Data Management at Scale, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Data Governance and Data Security

This chapter focuses on data governance and data security. Why discuss these topics together? Because they overlap and share a common goal: data governance determines what the data represents and what it can be used for, and data security then ensures that only authorized parties can access the data (in line with its intended uses).

Uniformly applying security in all areas of your architecture requires standardization and metadata management. There are data owners to be assigned, classifications to be set, and contracts between parties to be maintained. All of this information should be stored centrally in a uniform model. We’ll address many of these issues in this chapter, and the remainder in Chapter 9.

Data Governance

You might be wondering why you even need data governance. It is often perceived as a restrictive, bureaucratic, and controlling process. Won’t it slow down your data ambitions? These are valid questions, and indeed within small companies or start-ups, there typically isn’t any formal data governance; it’s done implicitly during the day-to-day activities. In small-scale organizations, most applications and data are owned and managed by a few individuals. Data volumes and varieties are relatively limited, so finding the data you need and getting your questions answered takes little time. Often all you need to do is question the colleague sitting next to you, and if they don’t know the answer, it’s probably a few desks ...