Given that your data underpins all the digital activities essential for delivering your services or products, its management will be the cornerstone of your organization’s success. Yet while employees need reliable access to accurate data for internal collaboration, processing documentation, making informed budget decisions, and more — our volume of data is continuously growing more complex and harder to manage.
Maintaining clean and organized data will need to be a top priority to ensure operational efficiency: research shows that 82% of organizations experience annual revenue growth when they possess strong data and analytics capabilities.
In honour of National Dapper Your Data Day, dedicated to highlighting the importance of data protection, we share best practices recommended by our IT support professionals to enhance your data quality.
Key challenges in data management
Organizations contend with various types and formats of digital data, from unstructured data like emails and PDFs, to structured data such as sales figures, customer information, and inventory records. This diverse data ecosystem is often fragmented across multiple non-integrated platforms, databases, systems, applications, and cloud environments.
Considering the extensive scope of data businesses process and generate daily, organizations face several challenges in managing it effectively:
- Volume: How much data do you possess?
- Location: Where is your data stored?
- Usage: How is the data utilized?
- Security: How is data security maintained?
Often, organizations lack adequate visibility into their data landscape, leading to insufficient data management practices. Consequently, reliance on inaccurate, inaccessible, and inconsistent data can result in poor business decisions, reduced productivity, and potential security breaches.
The Impact of Data Regulations
Data regulations are continuously evolving. Organizations unable to easily review and track their data risk non-compliance with industry standards, potentially exposing them to legal actions from customers or stakeholders over mismanaged data. Non-compliance can directly impact the bottom line, with Gartner estimating that poor data quality costs organizations $12.9 million on average every year.
The Benefits of Clean and Organized Data
Concerned about losing critical customer data, compromising confidential company records, or dealing with data discrepancies that hinder your work? This indicates a need for a cleaner data environment.
A well-maintained data environment offers substantial value, empowering informed decision-making and efficient operations. Key characteristics of such an environment include:
- Data Integrity: up-to-date, relevant, complete, accurate, consistent, and unique data
- Accessibility: A secure and user-friendly setup that allows end users to access and share your business data without requiring IT support
- Data Architecture: A robust framework that organizes data logically and systematically with standardized formatting that adheres to business standards and facilitates the easy retrieval of information.
- Data Policies: Clearly defined policies and procedures for data collection, processing, and management of data throughout its lifecycle from creation and maintenance to usage and deletion.
- Security: Comprehensive security measures to safeguard data integrity and confidentiality.
- Disaster Recovery: The ability to restore data availability in the case of a disaster recovery situation, breach, or system failure
Best Practices for Managing Your Data
Recognizing the importance and value of effective data management is the first step toward building a clean and organized data environment. This involves developing a robust data architecture with standardized data entry formats, clear naming conventions, and a well-defined taxonomy. It is equally important to ensure your IT ecosystem can maintain the availability and integrity of this organized data.
Below are a few practical strategies for making your data a powerful resource. For optimal results, work with an IT support expert to guide you through these implementations.
Virtualize your resources
Virtualizing IT components, such as servers, operating systems, networks, and storage devices, can help you manage your data more efficiently. Consolidating resources and applications into a centralized location allows for easier administration and scalability to meet changing data needs. This approach ensures consistent data management policies and ensures replication and failover mechanisms will efficiently kick in during a disaster recovery situation, minimizing downtime.
Establish robust data storage
A reliable storage infrastructure is necessary for securing and structuring organizational data to protect it from loss, corruption, or unauthorized access. Avoid storing your data in one location. Implement a second level of protection, whether such as a cloud environment or replicating it to an off-premises secondary site. Cloud-based storage helps your team across different departments retrieve consistent and current data.
Develop a strong data governance strategy
Establishing policies, processes, and standards is crucial to maintaining data usability, integrity, and security. This is particularly important as organizations prepare for AI and other emerging technologies. Assign clear roles and responsibilities to ensure your team understands how they should handle data. Implement access controls and permissions based on job roles and seniority, leveraging cloud-based tools such as Microsoft Entra ID to automate much of that work. Microsoft Purview Information Protection can help classify and label data based on sensitivity, conduct regular data audits, and apply protection and conditional access.
Prioritize data security
Maintaining an organized data environment requires establishing robust measures to protect against cyber-attacks and other security threats. Regularly update and patch your network and software, install anti-malware protection, set up firewalls, and implement threat detection solutions. Also, consider encrypting your data to safeguard its integrity.
Your staff and team should also be included in your data protection strategy. Develop an incident response plan to ensure you can quickly address any incidents before they cause significant damage, and train your staff on cybersecurity best practices so they can act responsibly to protect your data.
Get a clear view of your data
You can’t guarantee available, reliable, and high-quality data without regularly examining your data environment’s health. Implement tools and processes for continuously monitoring and tracking your data 24/7 to detect any inconsistencies, ineffective access controls, and other issues with your data governance.
This tactic will provide real-time insights into how data moves throughout your organization, aids in workflow optimization and enhances overall efficiency.
Leverage our IT support to simplify your data management
Your data plays a mission-critical role in achieving strategic goals, so establishing strong data management practices is essential to help your organization maximize productivity and drive growth.
By following these best practices and leveraging professional IT support, your organization can enhance its data management capabilities, ensuring long-term success and operational efficiency.
Connect with PC Corp to discuss how we can work together to protect your data and support your business growth.
