How do you handle data quality issues and data breaches as a data steward?

2 Data breaches

Data breaches are any unauthorized access, disclosure, or theft of the data that compromise its confidentiality, integrity, or availability. These breaches can occur from various sources, such as cyberattacks, insider threats, human errors, or natural disasters and can have serious consequences for your organization. To handle data breaches, it’s important to establish data security policies and procedures that define the roles, responsibilities, and rules for accessing and storing the data. Additionally, you should implement data security controls and measures to protect the data from unauthorized or malicious access. Data security tools and software can alert you of potential data breaches and help to block or mitigate them. Furthermore, you should document and report the data breaches and their sources, impacts, and actions to the relevant authorities. Finally, review and update the data security policies regularly to ensure they comply with the best practices and standards.

3 Data stewardship roles and responsibilities matrix

A data stewardship roles and responsibilities matrix can be a beneficial tool to define and clarify the roles and responsibilities of the data stewards and other data stakeholders in an organization. This matrix can help align the data stewardship activities with the business objectives and strategies, assign tasks to the appropriate data stewards and stakeholders, coordinate collaboration and communication among them, and evaluate performance against predefined criteria. To create this matrix, it’s important to identify relevant data domains and elements, identify involved or affected data stewards and stakeholders, define stewardship roles for each domain and element, map roles to the data stewards and stakeholders using a table or chart, and communicate and validate with them.

4 Data stewardship tools and software

Data stewardship tools and software are applications that can help you perform and automate data stewardship tasks and functions. These tools can assist in managing and governing the data lifecycle, from creation to disposal, as well as enhancing and maintaining the data quality, security, and usability. Additionally, they can monitor and report data performance, issues, and compliance, while also enabling collaboration and communication with data stakeholders. The market offers a variety of data stewardship tools, such as data catalog tools for discovering, documenting, and classifying data assets; data lineage tools for tracing, visualizing, and analyzing data flow and dependencies; data quality tools for detecting, correcting, and monitoring data quality issues; data security tools for protecting, encrypting, and auditing data access and usage; and data governance tools for defining, implementing, and enforcing data policies and rules.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?