Data Governance: The Definitive Guide

Preface

In recent years, the ease of moving to the cloud has motivated and energized a fast-growing community of data consumers to collect, capture, store, and analyze data for insights and decision making. For a number of reasons, as adoption of cloud computing continues to grow, information management stakeholders have questions about the potential risks involved in managing their data in the cloud. Evren faced such questions for the first time when he worked in healthcare and had to put in place the processes and technologies to govern data. Now at Google Cloud, Uri and Lak also answer these questions nearly every week and dispense advice on getting value from data, breaking down data silos, preserving anonymity, protecting sensitive information, and improving the trustworthiness of data.

We noticed that GDPR was what precipitated a sea change in customers’ behavior. Some customers even deleted their data, thinking it was the right thing to do. That reaction, more than any other, prompted us to write this book capturing the advice we have provided over the years to Google Cloud customers. If data is the new currency, we do not want enterprises to be scared of it. If the data is locked away or is not trustworthy, it is of no value.

We all pride ourselves on helping Google Cloud customers get value for their technical expenditures. Data is a huge investment, and we felt obligated to provide our customers with the best way to get value from it.

Customers’ questions usually involve ...