Data governance becomes fundamental to avoid an organization's security violation

In a chat with VARINDIA, Vinod Ganesan, Head - India, Cloudera discusses about the evolution of the company, data governance and how it is helping its customer to undergo their digital transformation 
 

The open source organization that has helped companies build analytics platform, Cloudera has come a very long way in terms of helping organization really solve some of the complex business challenges by helping them deliver meaningful outcomes.So today, Cloudera operates across the spectrum where large global banks, telcos, automotive companies across the globe and 40 plus government organizations actually rely on the company for driving meaningful business outcomes. 

“I think there are four key tenants that we provide as a part of the enterprise data platform that no other company is able to provide to these customers. So over the years through our association with customers, we realized that there are a lot of challenges that enterprises are facing. The biggest challenge in the data driven journey. The first challenge is data silos, organizations over the year have accumulated a lot of data but they are all living in different silos. So how to bring all the data together on a common platform which allows organizations to use it, mine it and start driving transformational initiatives around that data. The second aspect is, there is a huge propensity that organizations to adopt the public cloud. So that gives them the much required agility to move forward at a pace that business wants them to run. But the challenge is a lot of organizations did not really have a data strategy of embracing the public cloud because on one hand business is pushing IT, that they go ahead and innovate. However, IT also have their own legitimate concerns around data governance and security. So they also need to make sure that in the process of supporting the business, they do not violate on any of these key principles that the organization is built on. 

As a result of that, business tries to bypass IT and do something on their own which is giving rise to the phenomenon of shadow IT where a lot of business people try to take their own initiatives in terms of going on tocloud, which manifests as data privacy and a security risk to that organization. Today, Cloudera is able to address that requirement by supporting Hybrid and a multi cloud environment where businesses can confidently move the data across any cloud provider of their choice and we ensure that there is absolutely no compromise on the underlying security and the governance. So when the data moves, along with that, the data context, the associated lineage, the associated security policies, all of those also migrate along with the data. So we completely eliminate the risk and provide the agility for organizations to adopt a hybrid or a multi cloud strategy. The third important factor that organizations look for is around security and governance, which I spoke about some time back,” 

Data governance

Data is an important aspect for every company. To make use of the data, it has to be portable and different workloads on it but at the same time it cannot be compromised. 

“Data governance is one of the key elements. So, when I look at governance, for example, how do you unlock the true potential of analytics, the simple argument is – the data has to be made available to any user who wants to run analysis on top of that particular data, which means the data has to be highly portable, you need to move data across different set of users who may want to run different set of workloads on it. When you do that, the value of that data cannot be compromised, for example, there could be associated security policies of the organization in terms of which department has access to different kinds of data which has farfetched ramifications if it is openly made available to a lot of people. So typically today, why marketing department and CMOs are struggling is because they need to be wary of PII and data privacy norms. They are now required to do a consent based campaign management. So with these kind of changes in regulation and the way it affects business, I think governance becomes the fundamental aspect of how these policies are defined as a part of the underlying data architecture itself so that whenever the data moves, you are not really worried about violating any of those security or the associated principles and you are able to freely provision it to every user who wants to drive meaningful outcomes from that data,” explains Ganesan. 

Digital Transformation

As per Ganesan, Digital Transformation is a journey. Organizations embark on the journey to stay relevant in the market. The fundamental baseline that is required to embark on this digital innovation is the underlying data platform. 

Continuing on the same he says, “You need to have a platform that allows you to be a data driven enterprise which means I need to have control of all of my data. For example, we all started off as a data warehouse country, especially in India. The concept of data warehouse was born from the fact that I cannot run queries on my OLTP systems which are customer facing for getting intelligent and deeper insights. So now they created a separate infrastructure which was the data warehousing setup on which a lot of analytics and overlap queries were being run to do an analysis. The challenge there was the data warehouse was very good because basically it was connecting to all of transactional data sources and hence, the data was structured data. The moment business said now I want to analyse customer behaviour, the behavioural data is no longer present in these transactional systems. These are all present in the various channels through which a customer interacts with that particular organization, which means I have to onboard new data sources on to this platform to start getting a 360 degree view of my customers.So,Cloudera enables every customer today irrespective of whatever vertical he is in, to really deal with this different variety of data.”