How to tackle your biggest data governance challenges

The significant amount of data that you’re creating each year holds tremendous value if you’re ready to harness its potential. However, data management challenges are stopping some companies from adopting emerging technologies like AI that rely on data, according to a new McKinsey & Company report.

With the growing complexity of managing hybrid cloud environments, regulatory compliance, and rising security concerns, organizations can easily get overwhelmed. That’s where data governance comes in—and the right tools to help with key tasks like classification can take you from data chaos to data clarity.

What would your goals, from faster innovation to reduced storage costs, look like if you could turn your data governance strategy and infrastructure into a competitive advantage?

As data creation scales up, so does the effort that it takes to organize, to manage, and to extract actionable insights from that data. Data governance enables organizations like yours to work with data in a way that maximizes its value while minimizing risks. Companies often face common challenges when they try to get a handle on their data and implement a data governance strategy. Some of the most cited challenges include:

• Keeping pace with data growth. Data growth is accelerating rapidly, and with it, you face increased storage and management costs. Not having a strategy simply isn’t an option. Data that’s not properly managed will quickly spiral out of control, creating challenges like duplicate and stale data, increasing costs, and complicating data governance.
• Managing data silos and complexity. Historically, managing data across environments has required a plan to eliminate data silos. Silos emerge when data is stored in different locations or is managed by different teams, making it tough to access and to use the data effectively. Silos can lead to operational inefficiencies, inconsistent data, and increased storage and maintenance costs.
• Understanding and categorizing data. Without strong data classification, it’s difficult to understand what data you have and where it’s stored, and to achieve basic categorization. A lack of controls can create compliance risks and leave you struggling to capture data value or to develop policies for retention, access, and security.
• Supporting compliance and data security. Data is also central to a host of regulatory and privacy laws that are taking shape globally. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are just a few laws designed to protect personal data. If you don’t comply, there can be significant financial consequences, revenue impact, and reputational damage. A lack of visibility into your data can hinder your compliance efforts. And, without clear classification, securing sensitive data across your environments becomes difficult.
• Addressing limited visibility and analytics. For effective data governance, you need visibility across your entire data landscape. Limited observability and analytics make it hard to know where issues may arise, which systems are vulnerable, or whether policies are being followed.

Organizations that rely on manual data governance or that don’t have a data governance strategy in place across the data ecosystem face ongoing challenges with compliance, security, and control of storage costs. The good news is that building true cyber resilience means that you can tackle data governance challenges head-on.

The right tools can help you keep pace with fast-growing data, whether you’re improving classification or preventing data sprawl. NetApp provides tools that enable your organization to optimize your storage use and to cut unnecessary costs. NetApp^® BlueXP^™ classification makes it easy for you to quickly identify duplicate, stale, or nonbusiness data that can be archived or deleted, enabling you to strategically allocate storage resources.

If you’re moving data to the cloud or consolidating on-premises storage, it’s the perfect time to use solutions that provide data governance. Cleaning up and organizing your data before migration helps minimize the risk of moving irrelevant or unnecessary data, saving on storage costs and improving data quality in your updated environment.

Data silos can make it impossible to comprehensively govern data across your entire infrastructure. BlueXP classification, which unifies data storage by integrating all your data management into one platform, can help. When your data is integrated across on-premises and cloud environments, you get a unified platform to manage data across different locations seamlessly. By providing a common interface and visibility into all your data assets, NetApp can help your organization reduce complexity and eliminate silos.

With BlueXP classification, you can map, categorize, and have full visibility into your data on premises and in the cloud. And automation makes it easier to manage a hybrid multicloud data estate from a single-pane-of-glass interface. You can improve data governance with tools that transform what was once a chaotic landscape into a well-structured data estate.

Data classification doesn’t have to be tedious. Instead, by relying on intelligence embedded in the data layer of your infrastructure, you can use AI and machine learning to analyze and to categorize data across your data ecosystem. Automated classification helps you meet compliance requirements by identifying personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive data that may be subject to regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

This approach also automatically maps different data types and classifies sensitive information, helping you meet compliance demands while reducing manual data management. NetApp’s advanced tools provide automated compliance reporting and privacy risk assessments, giving you peace of mind that your data governance processes are meeting regulatory standards.

Visibility across the entire technology stack helps you better manage data and identify problems before they occur. For example, NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights offers end-to-end visibility into your hybrid multicloud infrastructure. You can monitor and manage your data in real time, visualize your full stack, see how resources are related, and use AI to detect anomalies and security risks. Better observability of all your data helps your IT team quickly identify and troubleshoot performance issues, detect potential security threats, and streamline data management. When you pair tools that provide greater visibility with data governance efforts, it’s easy to validate that data policies are being followed and to help reduce the risk of data breaches and bleeds.

Unlike traditional data governance solutions that rely heavily on manual processes, NetApp offers a comprehensive set of tools to automate and to simplify the governance of hybrid multicloud data estates. Whether it’s breaking down data silos, providing end-to-end observability, or automating compliance, NetApp solutions are designed to make data governance easier and more efficient. With unified control over your data, you can confirm that it remains compliant, secure, and optimized for use in AI projects, data migrations, and beyond.

Data governance doesn’t have to be complex or overwhelming. Find out how NetApp technology, the most secure storage on the planet, can help you quickly overcome data governance challenges and build true cyber resilience.