How to strike a balance between data sharing and compliance

It can seem like there is a direct conflict between sharing your data and staying compliant. Inviting business users into your data pipelines often comes with a lot of anxiety. This is especially true given that employee mistakes account for a whopping 88 percent of all data breach incidents.

While daunting, widening access is also critical for improving efficiency. Currently, only 13 percent of business users report being able to derive value from newly collected data in minutes or hours.

So, how do you find a balance between data sharing and compliance? How do you share your data without worrying about the potential fallout? Read on to find out.

Striking the balance between data sharing and compliance

It’s natural to be apprehensive about data sharing. Outside of compliance, there are many potential consequences that come with greater access. For example:

Will business users make errors and invalidate your data reports?
Will they funnel poor quality data into business applications?
What’s the impact on customers if business users are producing incorrect information?
What are the legal consequences and potential fines that come with mismanaged data handling?
Will business users cause reputational damage to your brand?

Mistakes are all too frequent. And when you hear that GDPR noncompliance penalties increased by 92 percent from H1 2021 to H1 2022, the thought of opening up access to data workflows is a recipe for high blood pressure.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be.

There is a way to share responsibly, safely and effectively. It relies on a culture change as well as the right processes and tools to support the shift.

Powering data sharing with the right platform

To help allay your worries, you need the right data platform - a platform that allows your IT teams to control data, while allowing business users to wield its power. A tool built with the culture and process of compliant data collaboration.

There are two critical reasons for this:

1. IT must maintain some control

While data owners have the ultimate authority over who should (and shouldn’t) have access to data, they cannot achieve this control without IT.

After all, IT is responsible for maintaining the technical environments, democratizing data, and providing data owners with the tools necessary to implement access management. As such, they should act as data gatekeepers, ensuring every data set is secure and of high quality, ready for the data owners to control.

The CloverDX platform supports the sharing of high-quality data across your business while keeping IT in full control. This means you can share data widely without compromising access management and governance.

2. Business users can harness the value of data. Fast.

For 76 percent of companies, including 74 percent of companies with $500 million-plus in revenue, it takes days or up to a week to prepare the data for revenue-impacting decisions.

This “time to decision making” is too slow. Business users need the opportunity to contextualize data at a faster rate so they can make fast decisions in a fast-moving market. To do this, business users need a safe environment to handle data without posing a risk to source data in your warehouses.

Doing this gives your IT teams the chance to assess the competency levels of each business user. It also provides them with the chance to educate users on safe data handling without having to assume any legitimate compliance risks.

CloverDX allows business users to access data in a format that is ready to use and supports risk-free analysis. With Data Catalog, IT teams can publish data to the organization - in collaboration with data owners - so that business users can access live, curated data, in a secure way.

And with self-service access to data, and the ability to create data transformations on their own without needing help from developers, business users can automate routine reporting tasks and analyze data more efficiently. As a result, they can accelerate their decision-making without the need for technical support or preparation.

Establish a data quality standard to guarantee compliance

Different business users will have varying levels of access and education when it comes to safe data handling. It’s up to IT teams to standardize best practices and track day-to-day data engagement. This means creating a cross-departmental data quality standard framework to reduce risk.

According to Melody Chien, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner,

“This will enable stakeholders across the enterprise to understand and execute their business operations in accordance with the defined and agreed-to data quality standard.”

According to a Thomson Reuters report, 70 percent of risk and compliance experts have increased their reliance on technology to improve decision making, performance monitoring, and risk management since the global pandemic. CloverDX is a platform that can do just that with a centralized, end-to-end data management platform that lets your IT teams safely share data, and gives your business users the power to harness it.

Data for everyone

The latest major version of the CloverDX platform - CloverDX6 - is designed to enable better collaboration between IT and business teams and drive data democratization.

It brings new capabilities that enable IT teams to share data securely, in a readily-accessible form that users can trust. IT remains in control of access and governance, and business users can access and explore data without risk.

This on-demand webinar shares some best practices for making self-service data available to users, and how CloverDX helps you balance that with the need

for security and governance: