How to improve Data Governance for Snowflake and BigQuery

Data governance is an important practice that needs to be maintained for several reasons. It helps ensure your data is accurate, consistent and secure. When data governance isn't practiced, data quality becomes inconsistent, which can lead to multiple problems within your organization.

Data governance is just one of the benefits Aggua offers to organizations. With the help of Aggua's more user-friendly application, users can surpass obstacles in data governance, but especially in BigQuery and Snowflake.

What is Data Governance?

Data governance is the collective name for the procedures, responsibilities, rules, standards, and measurements required to safeguard data assets. It guarantees that your company's data is reliable, accurate, and secured.

Data governance establishes the areas of responsibility and accountability for managing an organization's data assets. It also establishes how the organization will be using such data assets. The purpose is to ensure that all departments and divisions utilize the same knowledge and can make reliable inferences from it.

Without it, the organization would suffer a lot of data inconsistencies. For starters, they could run across data inconsistencies between several systems, such as when different departments list the same data in various ways. It may also raise concerns about who really "owns" the system. Inconsistencies in data are all too often caused by having too many people accountable for its management. Overall, a lack of adequate data governance leads to poor data quality, which undermines business users' confidence in the system and causes them to abandon it.

Who is involved in Data Governance?

Chief data officer

CDOs supervise data governance programs and are responsible for their success or failure. The CDO secures authorization, financing, and staffing for the program, leads its setup, monitors its success, and advocates for it internally.

Data governance committee

This committee or council establishes policies and standards. It comprises top executives as well as other data owners. They are responsible for approving the core data governance policy, any accompanying policies and norms regarding data access and usage, and implementation methods. If any conflict arises over data definitions and formats, they will be the one to settle the dispute.

Data stewards

Data stewards are in charge of maintaining the integrity of data sets and making sure that end users adhere to the policies and guidelines that have been established by the data governance committee.

Implementation Challenges

Although many organizations have identified the importance of data governance, some have also reported challenges with its implementation. These include:

1. Data Silos

Data silos are a prevalent issue for organizations as individual departments often gather their own data without sharing it with one another. They keep datasets protected and accessible to select groups.

Likewise, other departments may have their own protocols, priorities, and goals. Consequently, it's possible that other teams won't be able to use some data sets because they aren’t aware of them or don't realize the value they hold.

2. Data Distrust and Lack of Data Ownership

Data confidence and usefulness are reliant on having accurate and consistent data. Without these, users lose faith in reporting and analytics. The lack of data ownership that arises from outsourcing the development of data governance can be a serious issue as well. When this happens, security and assurance teams are unable to monitor the data asset and are kept in the dark about its processing, storage, and usage.

3. Poor Leadership

Strong leadership helps ensure that data teams follow the proper procedures for the adoption and enforcement of new rules and standards. Stakeholders also need to be actively involved to succeed. Its impacts should be regularly reviewed to ensure that employees are able to keep up with any new regulations and processes.

4. Misallocation of Resources

Companies collect massive quantities of data, but if that data isn't regularly updated and checked for errors, it could pose a real liability. Without data governance, teams would continue to operate in silos, creating duplicates of data, and fail to resolve issues. Due to this, accuracy suffers and time is wasted. User trust in the system will decline, and eventually stop using it altogether.

Where Does Aggua Come In?

Aggua is a collaborative data management software designed primarily for teams whose architecture is centered on Snowflake or BigQuery. Data governance is only one of the numerous benefits it offers to organizations. With the help of Aggua's more user-friendly application, users can surpass the limitations of data governance in bothBigQuery and Snowflake.

The data governance solution offered by Aggua allows customers to tag valuable assets and keep private information safe. It also strengthens the security of data by applying role-based clearance-levels and performing automatic masking for Snowflake and BigQuery.

Organizations may also adjust their data governance plans to meet their unique needs with the help of purpose-based policies and custom classifications while access requests can be handled directly via the company's communication channels.

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