Enterprises of all sizes increasingly realise the value of the growing volume of data they produce and the role it can play in enhancing their business performance. However, there’s a problem.

Managing this explosion of data safely and effectively can be complex. Data managers are increasingly required to oversee business-critical data spread across many enterprise applications and multi-cloud environments, including data lakes and warehouses.

Add in a growing level of regulation around data use, and the problems intensify. How to address all these issues while ensuring reliable data governance can be a challenging question to answer, especially as hybrid environments and data sources continue to evolve.

To achieve the best possible results, enterprises need to apply automated, analytic insights that enable the data transparency required to make intelligent, guided decisions on appropriate data use, whether in the cloud or on-premises. This will help deliver safe and trusted data democratisation and create more business value, generating new revenue streams.

A trusted framework for data governance

Data quality, data privacy and broader questions around building and maintaining trust through good data governance are consistently ranked as the top challenges in data management. As the role of data democratisation increases in business transformation, the number of non-technical data consumers wanting easy self-service access to their data – but who are not proficient at responsibly data governance – continues to grow. Even more so, a recent IDC Global Chief Data Officer survey revealed more than 51% of the data leaders are still managing ‘data complexities.’

Good data governance, data quality and privacy are critical to supporting enterprise-wide data literacy to drive business value with trust assurance. Reducing operational risks and building responsible data use is vital. So, it’s therefore essential that data governance becomes an accelerator rather than a liability.

Properly implemented, AI and automation can accelerate value creation. Still, a foundation of trusted data is required to democratise data use across an organisation to foster faster, broader and more accessible data sharing opportunities. This, in turn, can facilitate operational reporting and analysis and empower more data-driven decision-making thanks to the delivery of more general intelligence incorporating new data sources.

Unlocking the power of data

Instead of preserving data for the sole use of data scientists and other experts, an enterprise can make it available to a broader, trusted employee base to develop new business opportunities. In this way, it is possible to empower the knowledge workers in an organisation to perform their jobs transparently while consistently aligning to organisational policies for approved data use. On a practical level, this means creating a clean and trusted data supermarket aka data marketplace as a space for data sharing activities to accelerate consumption and use.

Having reliable data governance in place delivers assurances to an enterprise data community by providing the relevant insights, such as:

• The location of data and its context within a business
• A confirmation that the data is qualitative and safeguarded
• Verifying that analytic applications can use data.

A data community needs to enable the various lines of a business to deliver on trusted value creation opportunities while assuring data quality without compromising privacy or contravening internal and external mandates such as GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, PDPA, amongst others. The ideal for data stewards is for data consumption to be governed according to enterprise policies for data exposure and use, minimising risk while optimising value generation.

Off to market

A cloud data marketplace delivers all of this in an intuitive ‘shoppable’ interface with the foundations of data governance in place; a platform for data owners to easily package data products into categories organised by business functions, projects or even data domains.

It also provides an opportunity to collaborate with legal and compliance teams to ensure appropriate policies and standards are tagged with data products/categories, so the consumers like analysts, scientists, and others are aware of usage guidelines and compliance to regulations.

Lastly, organisations can understand who uses what data for what purposes and even expose gaps where data consumption is limited. Users spend less time manually looking for the data spread across the organisation and instead use their time to make better decisions with trusted data. In today’s multi-cloud, hybrid world – where 92% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy – data can sit in various locations, from data lakes and warehouses to SaaS systems.

Chief Data Officers should ensure that their chosen data marketplace can onboard data from internal systems, cloud sources and third-party tools. This will ensure that users can leverage existing data sets without additional curation to make the data available. This dramatically expands the pool of supported data consumers, accelerates time to value, and frees data scientists, and business users to find, understand, and begin using trusted data.

A spectrum of cloud-based opportunities

Enterprises of all sizes have significant opportunities within their grasp, openings that spring from connecting trusted data to people so they can use it to accelerate value creation. Empowering data use across an organisation generates intelligence that can drive innovation, which in turn creates enhanced customer loyalty, greater analytical accuracy, more competitive products and services and a radically more efficient operation.