In data governance, keeping an eye on how data is managed is crucial for making sure everything works well and adds value to the organization. Governance frameworks set up strong rules and procedures for handling data, but it’s monitoring that gives us real-time updates to keep these rules effective and adaptable. Monitoring is more than just tracking metrics, it’s a strategic tool for ensuring optimal performance, identifying potential issues and driving continuous improvement. Research shows that over 50% of mobile users abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load. This highlights the critical need for systems that can constantly monitor website performance and alert teams to potential issues before they escalate.  

So, what is monitoring? In simple terms, monitoring is a comprehensive operations, policies and performance management framework. The aim is to detect and alert about possible errors of a program or a system in a timely manner and deliver value to the business. This ongoing oversight is vital for maintaining transparency, auditability and overall data integrity throughout its lifecycle.

Effective data governance requires a comprehensive understanding of how data is being managed, used and protected. It’s important to note that the true value of monitoring becomes visible during challenges. When data quality issues happen or compliance problems occur governance usually gets blame.  This highlights the need for robust monitoring systems that can proactively identify and address problems before they get worse.

What to Monitor for Effective Data Governance?

Strong data governance helps organizations make better decisions, manage risks and optimize operations. Monitoring plays an important role in four key areas: data quality, data lineage, compliance and security. It ensures data accuracy and consistency, tracks its flow and origins, maintains regulatory compliance and protects sensitive information. While monitoring various infrastructure elements like operating systems, networks and servers is important, focusing on data quality, lineage, compliance and security is especially vital for robust data governance. Let’s explore how monitoring these areas strengthens a data governance framework.

Data Quality Monitoring

Data quality is crucial for organizations to trust their data and the results it produces. High-quality data builds confidence for further calculations and integration with other datasets. Given its importance, data quality should be monitored proactively. Compliance exceptions should be identified and flagged in real-time and issues should be addressed promptly to prevent disruptions to business processes.

To monitor data quality effectively:

• Set a Baseline: Establish a baseline to identify areas for improvement.
• Track Metrics: Monitor quality signals, such as completeness and accuracy, over time and compare them to predefined thresholds.
• Alert System: Trigger alerts when quality falls below acceptable standards to initiate corrective actions.

Good data quality means you can trust your data for important decisions and prevent issues before they cause problems.

Data Lineage Monitoring

The natural life cycle of data is that it is generated/created by multiple different sources and then undergoes various transformations to support organizational insights. There is a lot of valuable contexts generated from the source of the data and all along the way that is crucial to track. This is what data lineage is all about. Monitoring lineage is important to ensure data integrity, quality, usability, and the security of the resulting analysis and dashboards.

Also Read: SCIKIQ Data Lineage

To monitor data lineage:

• Map Data Flow: Create visual maps showing how data moves and transforms.
• Track Changes: Monitor the behaviour of data actors and their outputs. Set up alerts for incorrect outputs to investigate inputs and adjust or remove actors as needed.
• Understand Impact: Use lineage to audit and understand the impact of data breaches. Ensure the lineage record helps in regulatory compliance and risk management by providing details on data access, transformations, and movements.

By tracking data lineage, you can spot problems, understand data flows and make sure data is used correctly.

Compliance Monitoring

Understanding state and federal regulations, industry standards and governance policies and staying up to date on any changes ensures that compliance monitoring is effective. Noncompliance can lead to substantial fines, legal repercussions and damage to a company’s reputation. In a study from the Ponemon Institute the average cost for organizations that experience noncompliance problems is $14.82 million. That includes fines, forced compliance costs, lack of trust from customers and lost business. Due to the evolving nature of laws, monitoring compliance can be challenging and time-consuming. Regular audits and tracking access to data are crucial for ensuring compliance and preparing for potential government audits.

To Monitor Compliance: 

• Stay Updated: Keep up with new laws and regulations.
• Regular Audits: Check how well you’re following the rules and make necessary changes.
• Training: Educate your team about compliance and why it’s important.
• • Leverage Tools: Consider automated compliance tools for real-time monitoring and continuous assurance to minimize human error and gaps in compliance.

Regularly monitoring compliance helps avoid legal trouble and ensures your business is following the right rules.

Security Monitoring

Cyberattacks are a growing threat and can be very costly. Attacks cost more than money. They can affect a business’s brand and shareholder reputation. In the recent Equifax data breach, in which over 140 million records were exposed, the company most likely incurred a cost of more than $32 billion to resolve the issue. This was reflected in their stock price, which fell more than 30% after the breach. Perhaps even worse, adjacent firms in Equifax’s industry who did not get breached felt a 9% stock drop, likely due to loss of confidence in security measures.’ So even if you’re doing everything right, you can still be impacted by a breach. This highlights the critical need for security monitoring, which is the process of collecting and analyzing information to detect suspicious behaviour or unauthorized changes to catch threats early.

To monitor security:

• Real-Time Monitoring: Use tools to watch your network and systems continuously.
• Network and Endpoint Security: Monitor both the network and individual devices for threats.
• Choose Solutions: Decide whether to use in-house security tools or hire outside experts.

Effective security monitoring helps protect your data from breaches and keeps your business secure.

Core Features of a Monitoring System

Monitoring systems are essential tools and processes that ensure compliance, alertness, and auditing within an organization. Whether managed in-house, outsourced or cloud-based, they must align with business needs. Options include open-source tools or vendor services, each offering unique features to support optimal performance and operations.

Analysis in Real Time: Real time is real money. A good system provides continuous monitoring with minimal delays, allowing you to make changes and improvements on the fly.

System Alerts: A monitoring system must generate signal or alerts when something is happening so that it can be actioned. The alert should contain information about what is wrong and where to find additional information.

Notifications: A good monitoring system should support multiple notification channels such as SMS, email and chat. This ensures that critical alerts reach the right individuals, who can then coordinate responses and confirm that the issue is being addressed. Notifications can also trigger automated processes for faster resolution.

Reporting and Analytics: Monitoring systems collect vast amounts of data, which can be aggregated and analyzed to identify trends, correlate events, and predict future issues. Robust reporting capabilities are essential for presenting this data to different stakeholders within the organization.

Graphic Visualization: Visualization tools, like dashboards, are crucial for understanding the data collected by a monitoring system. A visual representation of what’s happening is easier for people to understand and is one of the top customer requests in a data governance solution. A good monitoring system should have friendly and easy-to-understand graphs that allow the organization to make decisions.

Customization: Different organizations have unique needs, and a monitoring system should be customizable to meet these requirements. This include customizing your monitoring system by function, user type, permissions, and more, allowing you to have the right alerts triggered, and to have them actioned by the right folks.

Monitoring systems should operate independently of production services to remain functional during outages or failures. It’s also essential to have a failover system in place to ensure continuous monitoring in the event of a system failure. As technology evolves, monitoring systems are becoming more advanced, incorporating machine learning and other sophisticated features. While the features outlined here provide a solid foundation, organizations should build the right monitoring system depending on your use case and company needs, augment your systems as needed. 

Monitoring Criteria

After selecting a monitoring system, it’s important to define the criteria you will use to track performance. Monitoring systems gather data in two ways: passive systems, which observe data generated under normal conditions (e.g., log files, output messages), and active systems, which proactively capture data using agents and monitoring modules integrated within production systems.

• Start by outlining the basic details, including rules, their purposes and distinct names. 
• Ensure your notification conditions are configured to alert the appropriate individuals when thresholds are breached with a robust system in place for acknowledgment and follow-up. 
• Additionally, define the frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) and timing of your validations to ensure consistent monitoring of system operations. 

Monitoring is essential to understanding how your governance implementations are performing on both a day-to-day and a longer-term basis. It is where the real results become evident, allowing you to ask for additional resources, course correct as needed, learn from the wins and failures and really showcase the impact of your governance program.

References

Andress, Jason. The Basics of Information Security: Understanding the Fundamentals of InfoSec in Theory and Practice.Syngress, 2011.

Data Management Body of Knowledge, DAMA International Technics Publications, Basking Ridge, New Jersey.Evren Eryurek, Uri Gilad, Valliappa Lakshmanan, Anita Kibunguchy, Jessi AshdownData Governance: The Definitive Guide. People, Process and Tools to Operationalize Data Trustworthiness. March 2021.

Also Read: Maximising Efficiency with Automated Data Governance