by Angela Guess
E.G. Nadhan of the Open Group Blog recently wrote, “In an earlier post, I had explained how you can build upon SOA governance to realize Cloud governance. But underlying both paradigms is a fundamental aspect that we have been dealing with ever since the dawn of IT—and that’s the data itself. In fact, IT used to be referred to as ‘data processing.’ Despite the continuing evolution of IT through various platforms, technologies, architectures and tools, at the end of the day IT is still processing data. However, the data has taken multiple shapes and forms—both structured and unstructured. And Cloud Computing has opened up opportunities to process and store structured and unstructured data. There has been a need for data governance since the day data processing was born, and today, it’s taken on a whole new dimension.”
Nadhan continues, “Let us challenge ourselves with a few questions. Consider them the what, why, when, where, who and how of data governance. What is data governance? It is the mechanism by which we ensure that the right corporate data is available to the right people, at the right time, in the right format, with the right context, through the right channels. Why is data governance needed? The Cloud, social networking and user-owned devices (BYOD) have acted as catalysts, triggering an unprecedented growth in recent years. We need to control and understand the data we are dealing with in order to process it effectively and securely.”
photo credit: eurleif
