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Ensuring data integrity in hybrid multi-cloud environments: A checklist for data professionals
Trusted data is more important than ever to fuel your business and make timely, confident decisions. The entire organization is counting on your data to be fit for purpose, ready to run business processes, and deliver successful initiatives.
In a report produced in partnership with the Center for Applied AI and Business Analytics at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, the number one goal for data programs was data-driven business decision-making.
Data leaders are pressured to drive efficiency and innovate in increasingly complex and risky environments. Competing priorities include:
- solving data issues while delivering on strategic initiatives
- managing complex, manual processes while trying to automate them
- mitigating security and compliance risks while moving the business forward with the latest technology advancements
Innovation is key to moving your business forward. Artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and analytics & business intelligence (BI) are just some of the strategic initiatives we see organizations like yours implement to unlock this tension.
Data integrity – or data with maximum accuracy, consistency, and context – is essential to fueling these critical business initiatives. But how do you achieve it?
The reality of today’s data landscape is that your organization is either currently managing data across a complex mix of cloud offerings, on-premises platforms, and mainframe or mid-range systems, or you’re planning to soon. These hybrid multi-cloud environments present new opportunities and unique challenges for delivering data integrity, making it crucial and difficult to achieve.
To help you navigate this complexity, we’ve compiled a checklist to guide you through the data modernization journey – featuring data integrity best practices and essential tools and techniques for effectively managing data in hybrid multi-cloud settings.
Checklist for Managing Data Integrity in Hybrid Multi-Cloud Environments
Align to Strategic Business Initiatives
Align data integrity projects with strategic business goals to ensure relevance, increase support and funding, and demonstrate their direct impact on achieving critical objectives like revenue growth and risk mitigation.
Identify stakeholders and desired outcomes
Identify stakeholders, understand their business outcomes, and establish relevant KPIs to ensure that data integrity initiatives are measurable and aligned with your organizational goals. This will also support successful project execution, future-proof operations, and build confidence among investors and employees.
Identify skills and data integrity capabilities
Identify the skills and data integrity capabilities needed to achieve your goals, hire skilled or upskill existing professionals to close the skill gap, and deploy the right tools to support your data integrity journey and drive innovation.
Assess data sources and assets
Identify the necessary data to support your initiative, where it’s stored, and the potential need for third-party datasets to support business objectives and fill gaps in existing data. With the proper tools, you should be able to easily connect to, catalog, profile, and perform data integrity tasks on each of your data sources.
Establish a robust data governance framework
Establish robust data governance, track data lineage, maintain a metadata repository, and develop a data catalog to manage data integrity, safeguard compliance, and support data accessibility and usability. A strong data governance framework ensures that critical data can be easily found, understood, trusted, and leveraged across your organization, leading to more accurate and informed decisions and reporting.
Connect and integrate data
Break down data silos and ensure connectivity to your data sources without unnecessary data movement to enhance data accessibility, improve data consistency, and support efficient operations. Your connectors and data integration tools should accommodate each data source you identified, regardless of complexity.
Improve data quality
Deliver accurate, consistent, and fit-for-purpose data by profiling, assessing, cleansing, validating, and standardizing it. To ensure consistent quality across your data environment and reduce data movement costs, use tools that allow you to design repeatable data quality processes once and run them wherever your data resides.
Observe data over time
Proactively monitor your data over time to uncover anomalies and vulnerabilities and enable timely corrective action that minimizes business disruption and prevents costly downstream data and analytics issues.
Enrich data with context
Understand that your first-party data often lacks all of the necessary attributes or variables to perform analytics or support business decisions. Enhance data usability and gain a competitive advantage by enriching your data with trusted third-party datasets, or derive new attributes through spatial analyses.
Monitor and adjust
Review data integrity metrics regularly, stay updated with regulatory changes, and implement continuous improvement and training practices to maintain data integrity. Measure the success of your strategic business initiatives, adjust your practices as necessary, and report progress back to key stakeholders.
Next Up: Data Integrity-Powered Success
Managing data integrity in hybrid multi-cloud environments is complex yet essential – but the good news is, you can follow this checklist to ensure your data is accurate, consistent, and contextual to support better business decisions and outcomes.
You can achieve data integrity and your strategic business goals on your own, but if you’d prefer help along the way, Precisely is here for you.
Our Strategic Services team provides a comprehensive range of consultative services tailored to your requirements, focused on delivering measurable outcomes and achieving your objectives. The team focuses on people, processes, and technology, engages at any lifecycle stage, provides industry expertise, and partners with system integrators for efficient project delivery when necessary.
Let’s work together to optimize your data integrity management practices. Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo to see our data integrity tools in action.