As businesses consider how to become CCPA compliant, it would be helpful to know what tools they can use to make the shift towards CCPA compliance a faster, smoother, and more cost-effective experience.
Data governance is a framework used in the management of an enterprise’s data assets. Data governance keeps data to a certain standard, ensures key stakeholders have visibility into the quality of their data sets, and is essential to implementing and reporting on data privacy regulations. Data governance tools are already becoming an increasingly important asset to businesses, considering how data is critical to maintaining a solid enterprise. However, with the CCPA and other regulations, data governance becomes even more vital.
The CCPA will require more from businesses in regard to the consumer data they hold, and it’s not the only regulation. The CCPA sprung up on the heels of the GDPR, and several U.S. states are implementing their own data protection regulations as well. Historically, companies have managed data governance on spreadsheets or SharePoint. However, this method gives no insights into the quality of managed data, is both tedious and time-consuming, and is constantly out of date.
Companies that invest in Informatica’s data governance platform reap many benefits of well-managed data. There is a reason that AXON is Informatica’s fastest growing product in the history of the company. Simply put, data governance has a proven ROI.
For companies that are new to data governance programs, becoming CCPA compliant is a great first project. While they may want to focus on other data-driven projects in the future, the CCPA gives companies a starting point for implementing their data governance program. After this project has proven the ROI of data governance, it can be expanded to other projects and departments, and expand its reach until the company has true enterprise data governance.
Managing poor data is pointless, as no one in the business will trust the data. Having high quality data makes the effort of data governance worth the investment because the data will be trusted by analysts, and the resulting business decisions will be trusted by executives.
To summarize: data governance is a powerful tool with proven ROI and it can be leveraged on its own, but data governance is most effective when a data quality platform is already in place.
The Strength of Data Security
With the CCPA in place, customers will have the right to sue companies that lose their data to hackers, so companies will have a new incentive to make data security a top priority. If they don’t, they jeopardize the safety of their customers’ personal data and put themselves in a vulnerable position where they may be hacked by thieves and then sued by customers. Security breaches also damage company reputation, creating major setbacks as companies work to regain customer trust.
Greater data security means greater data privacy, the major driving force of the CCPA. When data is secure, data privacy is protected. Informatica Secure@Source is a robust data security tool, and it can integrate with both AXON and Informatica Data Quality, creating a holistic data management package.
Data governance, data security, and data privacy are all bolstered when resting on a foundation of quality data. Maintaining high quality data allows companies to achieve better data security and prevent risks. When data quality is low, security alerts can be triggered even when there are no actual threats, causing companies to lose faith in the accuracy of their alerts and sometimes even leading them to not act on a real threat under the pretense that the alert is another false alarm.
Additionally, having low-quality, mislabeled data means some data that should be treated with the utmost security might not receive such treatment because its label fails to denote how important it is.
These flaws mean that data is subject to risks and threats. Having a high quality data platform allows companies to avoid these flaws and protect customer data.
Businesses with integrated data quality and data governance tools will have a platform on which to effectively implement policies regarding the CCPA and other regulations. Finding tools that work together to create a holistic view of data is essential, or else businesses will be left with a fragmented, siloed view.
This is why Informatica is trusted by companies across the globe. Not only is Informatica a 12-time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Data Quality tools, but Informatica has products to also cover data governance, data security, and more. CCPA compliance isn’t an easy shift, or even a short one, but with effective tools powering a strong data governance platform, it can certainly be more manageable and straightforward.
