Best Data Governance Solution

The data governance market is expected to grow from $1.31 billion in 2018 to $3.53 billion by 2023, increasing by a CAGR of 22%, according to a recent ResearchandMarkets.com report.

What is driving that growth? It is a combination of factors, the research shows, including rapidly increasing data volumes, new regulatory and compliance mandates, and the need to enhance strategic risk management and decision making as well as greater business collaboration.

In particular, the E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018, is driving greater data governance awareness. According to the guide, GDPR provides the following rights to individuals regarding their PII: the right to be informed; the right of access; the right to rectification; the right to erasure; the right to restrict processing; the right to data portability; and other rights. Non-compliant organizations risk triggering fines up to 20 million euros or 4% of global revenue, whichever is higher.  

According to Big Data Quarterly columnists Michael Corey and Don Sullivan, the regulation language is clear “that within 72 hours of the legally responsible party initially becoming aware of a personal data breach, all affected customers must be notified without delay. Companies choosing to delay notification until they determine how to position the incident or ‘spin’ the message about the breach publicly will be violating the intent and possibly the letter of the regulation.”

To adhere to GDPR and other increasingly stringent data handling mandates, insight, and governance of data handling is required.

“Regardless of a company’s policy and strategy around GDPR, and its knowledge of what is in its systems, the required level of governance and control at most companies is not mature,” Rex Ahlstrom, chief strategy and technology officer at BackOffice Associates, a provider of information governance and data stewardship solution, recently observed.

However, he added, GDPR actually presents an opportunity for companies to look at information as an asset and to understand that the data may be more valuable than even the applications companies are running that data on because it informs about customers, products, profitability—everything. “If GDPR gets executives motivated because of the threat of fines to actually start implementing an information governance strategy, then they will benefit long-term—not only in compliance with GDPR—but in actually starting to manage that information to deliver value back to the company.”

The focus on data governance is also shared by erwin, Inc., which rebranded itself as “the data governance company, following private equity firm Parallax Capital Partners’ acquisition of erwin from CA Technologies in April 2016.

“Data governance is becoming to data what ERP was to finance 15 years ago,” said Adam Famularo, CEO of erwin.  “The whole notion of being able to manage your data assets throughout your enterprise and have people such as data stewards and data analysts that can help manage and understand the meaning of words, the data assets themselves, and create standards from one database to another—that increases data security and data quality.”

Acknowledging that  data governance, which provides diligent and comprehensive data management practices for data integrity, security, usability, and availability, is at the heart of preparing for regulations, such as GDPR,  IBM announced 1 year ago that it is spearheading a new Open Data Governance Consortium to advance Apache Atlas governance development.

From the volume and the continued distribution of data across increasingly complex network clusters, to the growing wave of data regulations, such as GDPR, the need to organize, analyze and govern data becomes more critical each day, said Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Analytics, at the time of the IBM announcement. “With the governance moves we’re making today, we’re giving organizations more ways to begin to not only understand what they have, but leverage it to make better business decisions and prepare for compliance.”

Best Data Governance Solution

BackOffice Associates Data Stewardship Platform

Finalists

IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Management

erwin Data Governance