Data democratization is one of the most crucial elements that modern businesses need to sustain and scale, especially for enterprises that are critically dependent on data to make decisions.
Earlier, the IT teams governed the data, and departments that required data to operate had to go through the IT teams to access the data. There has been a paradigm shift over the years in how businesses gather, process, govern and analyze data. Enterprises that embraced data democratization enabled them to make data accessible to all users without the need for IT. However, democratizing data has some inherent challenges that they impose on businesses.
Also Read: Enterprise Kubernetes Platform Challenges in Hybrid Cloud
Here are a few data democratization challenges that CDOs need to be aware of:
Implementation and training
As organizations are generating a large volume of data, they are finding it difficult to determine how the data is being utilized.
One of the most significant challenges while data democratization is to ensure that users with access to the data sets will be able to make informed decisions through the gathered insights.
The efforts to democratize the data will be in vain if the users are not able to get actionable insights. Enterprises can create a framework to identify usable data, but many businesses find it difficult because of a lack of talent or resources.
Enforcing effective Data Governance policies
Organizations enforce data governance to ensure seamless access to clean data while being compliant with security and governance policies. The lack of effective data governance policies will have a drastic impact on the workflows and strategies for how the systems process data. It will result in inconsistency in data accessibility, availability, integrity, and efficiency. CDOs should consider evaluating their entire data management processes to understand who has access to what data and do they require access to it or not. It is crucial for businesses to understand how access plays a crucial role in securing democratized data.
Ensuring data quality
Either lack of data governance policies or understanding, bad data will result in trust issues and its capabilities to make informed decisions. Organizations that are not able to clean, transform and load data in real-time might have a negative influence on the business flow. As organizations are generating a large volume of data, they are finding it difficult to determine how the data is being utilized. CDOs should consider evaluating the business’s capabilities to understand the data holistically and determine what it can or cannot do.
Also Read: CIOs Playbook to Prep Up for the Next Business Disruption
Securing the data
SecOps teams find it challenging to secure infrastructure or data that are dispersed. As data democratization leads to dispersed data at multiple systems, servers, and user accounts, making it challenging for the SecOPs teams to secure the data. Data democratization enables access to data from multiple resources, which exposes it to various risks. Especially organizations with dispersed data globally find it difficult to be compliant with all the data compliance laws enforced by the governing authorities. Regulatory bodies like GDPR and HIPAA in the U.S. are making their laws stringent to ensure customers’ right to privacy.
Check Out The New Enterprisetalk Podcast. For more such updates follow us on Google News Enterprisetalk News.