Rising interest rates, inflation and a global economic decline have created a challenging macroeconomic environment, with recent data from The International Monetary Fund showing that India and five major Southeast Asian powerhouses – Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand – are expected to experience a protracted economic slowdown until 2024.
This slowdown will likely cause organizations to tighten their belts in anticipation; IDC’s poll of CIOs in December 2022 revealed that 49% are expected to reduce the ‘run’ part of the IT budget to fund new ‘build’ initiatives/projects in 2023. This shift in spending highlights the need for companies to double down on improving efficiency and optimization. Organizations can enhance these areas by leveraging data to make better business decisions, inform quicker learning, and innovate better.
Building a foundation for accelerating data innovation
Highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, and the public sector all face similar challenges when it comes to using their data, which include data accuracy, time to value, and disparate platforms and systems.
It is critical to remember that an organization’s insights are only as good as the data used. With obsolete and/or inaccurate data, many organizations find it difficult to see what’s ahead and are unable to make informed business decisions. By integrating disparate data sources with the ability to govern data regardless of where it is stored or located, organizations can eliminate data silos, prevent limited data access, and avoid the bottlenecked speed of access. An organization with an effective data strategy can promote innovation and cross-functional collaboration, and harness data-driven insights for a competitive advantage.
Better data management can also be used to improve regulatory compliance when businesses can distill more granular insights, in real-time when needed, which is a critical part of business in highly regulated industries. Tapping into the power of data, artificial intelligence (AI) and ML lets organizations better identify compliance risks, reduce errors during reporting, and automate repetitive tasks – freeing up employees to focus on executing higher-value activities.
Harnessing AI and ML requires organizations to obtain granular control of immense amounts of data across environments at scale – a feat only possible with modern data architectures. It is crucial to manage metadata efficiently, data workloads, and data applications between on-premises, and in the cloud, while controlling data flow no matter where the data resides. Doing so allows consistent, simple, secure, and scalable access and analytics of data across the organization while reducing data silos.
Managing data in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, creating a sound data strategy, analyzing data, and ensuring compliance can help organizations stay ahead of the competition. Data governance is the key to keeping these areas working in harmony in the long term.
As industries worldwide continue to focus on using AI, organizations – especially those in highly regulated industries – must ensure that the data used to power these innovations is well-governed and adheres to privacy regulations, so that use cases are free from bias, and do not present any security and accountability issues.
IDC predicts that 55% of Asia Pacific healthcare organizations will have data governance frameworks in place to manage the ethical use of AI in healthcare by 2026. It is clear that organizations in highly regulated industries can get a head start by deploying hybrid data platforms that have built-in security and governance capabilities to support the secure, authorized and appropriate use of data.
Improving data governance to seize opportunities and maximize resources
Without proper data governance practices, organizations spend more time verifying, cleaning, and processing inaccurate, incomplete, or corrupted data. This not only wastes resources but prevents the enterprise from scaling up its data efforts to harness advanced, real-time analytics, leaving them uncertain if they can “trust” the data to make decisions.
To achieve effective data governance, organizations must dismantle data silos and instill in employees the importance of the proper use of data. Organizations should keep senior management informed and convince them of the benefits of good data governance so that they remain committed to building it across the enterprise. Business leaders must act as stewards and play their part in maintaining good data quality, which should be held to an even higher standard in highly regulated industries.
One of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to implement good data governance is deploying a platform that has security and governance protocols built in. This centralized governance approach facilitates compliance and avails self-service data access for all users, while establishing a consistent layer of security and governance across all cloud environments and the organization’s data-driven initiatives.
Having the platform function as a single source of truth enables traceability of data lineage, allowing employees a clear view of the data’s entire lifecycle as they aim for maximum accuracy and consistency of data, while also fulfilling regulatory requirements.
Better data governance, better business
Having strong data governance practices in place provides enterprises with timely data key to deriving valuable and accurate insights. These insights enable organizations to quickly identify growing market trends, and reduce costs, or optimize business processes in response. More importantly, proper data governance reduces regulatory risk, especially as regulations are tightened in the wake of business disruptions – a key requirement for organizations in highly regulated industries.
Besides time and costs spent on cleaning and processing data – good data governance enables organizations to mitigate risks and ensure reliability across the enterprise as employees develop new business use cases. Most importantly, enterprises must remember that data governance enables organizations to gain foresight and maintain a competitive edge for better business – even amidst today’s turbulent market conditions.
The author is VP of Business and Product Solutions at Cloudera
