Data Governance

A Long Island-based digital marketing firm was drowning in the vast amounts of data it had been retaining indefinitely. It’s 15TB+ data footprint was comprised of several years’ worth of email data, creative materials (customer renderings and production-ready art files), productivity data (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files) and font libraries. In addition to the age of the data, it was also found that there were several copies of the same data stored on local workstations and on server file shares. 

The general lack of data organization, data inventory and overall data retention policy was costing the firm in excessive storage, backup, management and productivity costs. This lack of control over the company and customer data began to manifest itself in other adverse ways, such as sending incorrect versions of production files to customers, impinging on font licensing agreements due to lack of control over font purchasing and inventory, and the risk of data loss due to backups not being adequately configured and managed to account for the lack of control over the data population.

The digital media firm had asked Iron Key Group to help them get a stronger handle on the company and customer data footprint, and to help them develop a longer-term strategy for data management and governance. 

While this digital media firm had very ambitious goals to immediately develop a comprehensive Master Data Management (MDM) program, Iron Key Group advised the company to take a more pragmatic and incremental approach to getting control over its data: implement a data governance strategy. Data governance is an enabling framework of decision rights and accountabilities for data-related processes. It is based on agreed-upon models that describe who can take what actions with what data, when, and using what methods. Implementing an initial data governance program will result in true business-and-IT collaboration that will lead to increased consistency and confidence in decision making, which in turn increases productivity and growth. Iron Key Group outlined four specific steps for the company to take as it embarked on its data governance program:

• Through this use of a detailed questionnaire, determine the company’s readiness to implement a data governance model. If the company is not ready, and the business does not buy into the overall concept, the data governance program will be a time-consuming, costly and annoying inhibitor to progress, and will never yield the type of results that most companies are  seeking.
• Develop a comprehensive Data Glossary – or detailed inventory – of the company’s data. This includes what the data is, where it resides, what is it used for, who owns it, what system(s) it comes from or is used by, should it be backed up or not, how long should it be retained, etc.
• Identify “data stewards” for each data type across all business functions. These data stewards will have ownership and accountability for how data is created, used, and curated throughout the enterprise to gain a keener perspective of the company’s overall data-related requirements.
• Develop Data Governance and Data Retention policies that the entire organization can understand and acknowledge, and that can be used as the guiding principal for all data-related matters for the firm.

In addition to the above, Iron Key Group performed a detailed analysis of how the company works and uses data throughout its day-to-day operations and performed a comprehensive review of the company’s backup configuration and overall effectiveness.

 After several weeks of working closely with the digital media firm and understanding how the company works and how it needs to leverage data and information to run the business, Iron Key Group was able to recommend and implement the following solutions to establish a solid and sustainable data governance model, and to help the firm begin to realize the results it was expecting:

• In order to get a firm handle on data access and location, Iron Key Group implemented Varonis’ DataAnywhere and DataPrivilege. These products eliminated the need for local copies of creative and productivity files, centralized the data repository and allowed for data sharing and version control, and allowed for the explicit permission of access files through a simple access request process. The result was a significant decrease in the firm’s data footprint, and a much larger and more effective control over the access to and flow of the company and customer data.
• Replaced the firm’s outdated and unreliable tape backup system and implemented a cloud backup solution with onsite and cloud vaults that backup the firm’s data on a nightly basis. Iron Key Group worked with the company to determine exactly what needs to be backed up and when, and what the new backup retention policy should be.
• Performed a data governance readiness assessment with the entire organization and determined that the company was ready to embark on a data governance program. The company was clearly ready to dedicate the time and resources to getting a handle on its runaway data situation.
• Performed a comprehensive data inventory process with the company and established its formal Data Glossary. This process identified all data types and attributes and assigned ownership to newly identified data stewards. During this process, the team discovered several terabytes of outdated, unnecessary data that was being stored and managed. This data was subsequently purged from all company systems.
• Developed and implemented formal Data Governance and Data Retention policies that all employees read and acknowledged. The Data Retention policy sparked a data clean-up effort and initiated other new standard company processes, such as a new email retention approach. In addition to the outdated and unnecessary data outlined above, the company was able to further reduce its data footprint by only keeping the production data it needed to effectively run the business. The overall result was as a reduction from 15TB of original data to ~8TB of active production data; saving the firm tens of thousands of dollars in storage, backup and overall productivity costs.
• The firm was able to turn its data nightmare into a revenue opportunity by allowing its customers to retain creative data/files on the company’s file servers for 5 years and pay a fee for any required retention beyond that. If the customer was not interested, the company would transfer the creative files to the customer and purge it from its systems. This allows the company to keep tighter control over customer data and ensure that the old ways of indefinite data retention were truly a thing of the past.
• Font library and font handling processes were established to ensure that the company was using the properly licensed fonts within its creative process. This new approach eliminated the guesswork regarding whether the stored fonts were legal or not, and increased productivity by clearly defining the font procurement, storage and usage process for all creative personnel.

The positive results of the above engagement were numerous; from cost savings, to productivity gains, to revenue generation. While the data governance approach is not the most complicated one to undertake, it can be the most challenging if the requisite business buy-in does not exist. Data governance is not an IT initiative, it is a business one. This digital media firm made the necessary commitments, and ultimately yielded the expected positive results, by making sure all aspects of the business were represented and dedicated to lasting change. The company is now planning to take its data management approach to the next step by exploring Master Data Management.