What is data governance?

Data governance is a crucial component of an organization's data management strategy, ensuring data integrity, quality, and access control. With increasing concerns about data security and privacy, businesses must prioritize data governance to stay compliant with regulations such as GDPR, LGPD, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2. Effective data governance can improve data quality, lower costs, and make relevant data accessible for employees. The four dimensions of data governance include policies, processes, roles, and technology. Policies outline guidelines for managing and using data, while processes define how data is created, stored, accessed, changed, moved, expired, deleted, monitored, and audited. Roles determine who can access or modify data, and technology integrates across the modern data stack to support governance efforts.