Addressing data governance in a hybrid cloud world

As more organizations look to deploy AI and LLMs across their operations to drive a competitive edge, ensuring the data being used to power these innovations is of high enough quality is becoming business critical. To give these AI and LLM innovations the best chance of success, many organizations are turning to hybrid cloud infrastructures, making use of both on-premises and cloud to ensure they can tap into valuable data.

But hybrid cloud infrastructure comes with its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to data governance. Inherently, a hybrid infrastructure allows data to move between environments, which can make that data vulnerable to not only security risks but also growing regulatory compliance considerations. With so many regulations surrounding data firmly in place, such as the EU’s GDPR and the US HIPAA, compliance is crucial to business operations. GDPR fines alone can reach 2 percent of global turnover. A penalty of this magnitude would have a huge impact on the entire organization.

Cloudera research found that 72 percent of enterprise leaders agreed that data governance was an enabler of business value. However, barriers remain when it comes to making data governance measures comprehensive and impactful.  

As hybrid cloud architectures continue to gain traction, the data silos have proven to be the most persistent problem for IT professionals when it comes to driving data governance. A separate Cloudera survey found that 26 percent of enterprise practitioners reported they had between 50 and 100 data silos spread across their organizations. When operations span multiple tools and environments, it becomes a lot harder to maintain a unified and transparent view across the organization. Without proper data management through seamless access and visibility, workloads can become isolated, bringing down the standard of governance.

These data silos created by hybrid cloud mean that some IT leaders attempt a more fragmented approach to governance, which is only effective to a point. Often, this strategy leads to ‘islands of perfection’, where governance appears to be happening effectively, leading to IT leaders mistakenly think everything is in hand. But when this strategy scales across an enterprise, governance becomes disparate and isolated. Any changes in the regulatory landscape can cause the whole system to collapse, and over time the connections between datasets become harder and more expensive to create, manage and maintain.

Breaking down barriers

To ensure consistent, effective, holistic data governance across hybrid environments, organizations need to utilise solutions and architectures that provide an enterprise-level, unified, viewpoint of data and governance. By deploying modern data architectures like a data fabric, underpinned by a hybrid data platform, organizations can bring all of their data, regardless of structure or location, into one unified view. This helps IT leaders to understand when and where they need to take action to ensure governance.

This approach also infuses automation into data management, enabling organizations to unlock, sort and investigate. IT leaders can then determine what data belongs where and who needs access to it, bolstering internal guidelines and policies that feed back to data governance.

As the compliance landscape becomes increasingly complex, data governance isn’t an issue that will disappear.  If anything, it will become more challenging as organizations adopt new complex technologies like AI, which necessitate more nuanced cloud environments.

Effective data governance is critical for organizations to be successful. A hybrid platform for not only data, but also analytics, and AI can help to address any security, regulatory or accessibility concerns, enabling organizations to maximize the value of their data and maintain trust in their digital foundations. Those that continue with a more fragmented approach to governance will be caught out by complexity and catch the ever-watchful eye of regional and industry regulators.

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Wim Stoop is Senior Director, Product Marketing at Cloudera.