You can’t have a sturdy, stable and secure house without a solid foundation. A foundation provides stability and keeps a house upright and secure in adverse conditions like strong winds, earthquakes, or heavy rainfall. It even can help protect a home from water damage and mold growth by acting as a barrier against moisture. Without a solid foundation, a house could become unstable or even collapse over time.
Given the explosion of data in organizations, increasing disciplines to which that data must be applied, the importance of identifying and protecting personal and sensitive data, and the threats to that data in the form of increased cyberattacks, your organizational data “house” also needs a solid foundation. Without it, you can’t get to the data you need when you need it, and worse, you can’t protect the data you need to protect.
Information governance (IG) is the comprehensive framework that organizations must embrace which provides a foundation for various disciplines within an organization, including eDiscovery, cybersecurity, data privacy, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this post, we will discuss how information governance supports the data disciplines that every organization must address today.
How Information Governance Supports Your Data Disciplines
Information governance supports an organization’s data disciplines by establishing comprehensive policies and procedures that ensure the effective management, protection, and utilization of data across those data disciplines. Here is how IG supports each data discipline:
eDiscovery
You already know that IG is important to supporting eDiscovery in litigation, investigations and more. Why else would the EDRM model have the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) embedded within it? Here are some specific ways in which IG supports eDiscovery.
- Efficient Data Management: IG provides structure and organization to data, making it easier to locate and retrieve information during identification, preservation and collection.
- Retention and Disposal Policies: By enforcing retention and disposal policies, IG ensures that relevant information is preserved while redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) data is eliminated, streamlining eDiscovery efforts.
- Legal Hold Management: IG frameworks support procedures for implementing legal holds to prevent the destruction of relevant data during litigation. Those frameworks are coordinated with the legal hold process to ensure that data that no longer needs to be held for discovery purposes returns to control under retention and destruction policies.
- Audit Trails: IG supports the maintenance of detailed records of data access and changes, providing essential audit trails that support eDiscovery processes.
Organizations with strong IG programs recognize that eDiscovery begins before the case is ever filed. Without an effective IG program, your organization is often playing “catch up” during discovery.
Cybersecurity
An organization’s cybersecurity data disciplines are key to protecting sensitive information, mitigating risks, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Here’s how IG can support and strengthen your cybersecurity program:
- Policy Development and Enforcement: IG establishes policies and procedures that define how information is managed, accessed, and protected. These policies and procedures provide a “jump start” in creating robust cybersecurity protocols.
- Risk Management: By identifying and classifying information assets, IG aids in assessing risks and implementing appropriate security controls, focusing those controls where they’re needed most.
- Data Integrity and Confidentiality: IG helps ensure the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of data, without which, maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of that data becomes difficult to impossible.
- Incident Response: No matter how prepared you are, a cyber incident could still happen. IG frameworks typically include incident response plans, which are essential for effective cybersecurity incident management and mitigation.
We’re seeing more data breaches than ever before, impacting more victims than ever before. An effective IG program helps minimize the risk of a data breach happening, and the impact of a data breach should your organization experience a cyberattack.
Data Privacy
An organization’s data privacy disciplines must safeguard personal information, maintain customer trust, and ensure compliance with data protection regulations. Here’s how IG supports those data privacy obligations:
- Compliance: In the past six years, we’ve seen the European Union implement GDPR and 19 US states pass comprehensive data privacy laws. IG helps organizations comply with ever-evolving data privacy regulations by conforming to rules on how personal data should be collected, processed, stored, and deleted.
- Data Subject Rights: IG frameworks ensure mechanisms are in place to respect and fulfill data subject rights, such as access, correction, and deletion of personal data.
- Data Minimization and Retention: IG principles promote data minimization and define retention schedules, reducing the volume of personal data stored and thus limiting privacy risks.
- Privacy by Design: IG helps integrate privacy considerations into the design of business processes and information systems.
Protecting the data of your customers is job one – or you may lose those customers. IG helps ensure private and sensitive data is identified and protected.
Artificial Intelligence
AI has become the “elephant in the room” that every organization must consider. An organization’s AI data disciplines are vital for ensuring the ethical, transparent, and effective development and deployment of AI systems, while maintaining data quality and regulatory compliance. Here’s how IG helps your organization meet its AI goals:
- Data Quality and Consistency: The idea of “garbage in, garbage out” is even more important to the success of AI models. IG ensures that the data used for AI is accurate, consistent, and reliable, which is critical for training and deploying effective AI models.
- Ethical and Responsible AI: Today’s IG frameworks typically include guidelines for ethical AI use, addressing issues such as bias, transparency, and accountability in AI systems.
- Data Governance: IG establishes clear ownership and stewardship of data, facilitating effective data governance practices that support AI initiatives.
- Regulatory Compliance: IG ensures that AI systems comply with relevant regulations and standards, particularly those related to data protection and privacy.
AI models live on data – lots and lots of data. An effective IG program enables AI models to perform as required, effectively and ethically.
Your Data Disciplines Start with a Solid Foundation
When people shop for a house, they care about things like location, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, updates and more. Nobody talks about the foundation, though it’s always checked as part of the home inspection to ensure it’s solid – if not, the house sale typically falls through.
Organizations talk a lot about eDiscovery, cybersecurity, data privacy and (especially) AI. They don’t talk about information governance near enough. But, without IG, those disciplines suffer, and issues typically emerge. Ensure a solid IG foundation to maximize the effectiveness of your organization’s data disciplines!
For more regarding Trustpoint.One’s Information Governance capabilities, click here.