5 Ways To Ensure That You’re Ingesting and Utilizing Healthy Data

As the world moves increasingly online, more businesses rely on data to inform their decision-making. However, it’s not enough to simply have data – that data needs to be of high quality, lest it leads your organization astray. In this blog post, we’ll discuss five ways to ensure that the information your organization is ingesting and utilizing is healthy.

One of the essential tips for keeping your data healthy is implementing a system that can automate it for you. There is a lot of software to help you fix data health issues on the market, so you should keep these tips in mind while searching for your solution.

Implementing a Data Quality Management System

The first step to ensuring healthy data is implementing a data quality management system. This system should include processes and controls for data entry, storage, and retrieval, as well as for maintaining the integrity of your organization’s data. With such a system, you can quickly catch and fix data health issues and prevent them from propagating throughout your data set.

Data quality management systems can be complex, so working with a vendor with experience implementing these solutions is important. Additionally, you’ll want to ensure that your chosen plan is tailored to your organization’s specific needs.

Use Data Governance Principles

Data governance is the practice of implementing and enforcing rules and standards for data management. It includes collecting, tracking, analyzing, and reporting on data to ensure that it is high quality and meets the organization’s needs. Data governance also helps to ensure that data is secure and accessible to authorized users.

Data governance principles provide a framework for managing your data effectively. By adhering to these principles, you can ensure that your information is accurate, consistent, and accessible – three key qualities of healthy data.

There are several critical components of a successful data governance program:

• Policies and Procedures: These documents define how data is collected, used, and stored. They also specify which users have access to which data sets and their level of access.
• Standards: Standards define the format, structure, and content of data sets. They ensure that data is consistent across different departments and data sets.
• Tools and Technologies: Technologies such as data cleansing software and master data management systems help ensure data quality.
• People: The people responsible for implementing and enforcing the data governance program are critical to its success. They need to be knowledgeable about the policies and procedures and the technologies used in the program.

Clean Your Data Regularly

Just like you would declutter your home regularly, you should also clean your data regularly. This involves identifying and removing duplicate records, ensuring accuracy and completeness of information, and standardizing formats. Keeping your data clean can avoid decision-making based on inaccurate or irrelevant information.

There are several ways to clean your data:

• Do it manually: This is only practical for small data sets.
• Use data cleansing software: This option is more efficient for larger data sets. Data cleansing software can be used to identify and correct errors in data, as well as to standardize formats.
• Outsource the task: If you don’t have the time or resources to clean your data yourself, you can hire a third-party provider to do it for you.

Store Your Data Securely

For your data to be healthy, it must also be secure. Hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, so it’s vital to protect your organization’s data from being breached. This includes encrypting sensitive information, implementing access controls, and monitoring activity for any suspicious behavior.

Organizations must also be prepared for the possibility of data loss. This can be caused by hardware failure, software corruption, or human error. To protect against data loss, organizations should implement regular backups and have a disaster recovery plan in place.

Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan

Despite your efforts to keep your data healthy, sometimes accidents happen – systems fail, hardware breaks down, etc. That’s why it’s crucial to have a disaster recovery plan in place in case something goes wrong. This plan should detail how you will back up and restore your data in the event of an incident.

Your disaster recovery plan should be tested regularly to ensure effectiveness. This can be done by simulating different types of disasters and testing how well the method works.

Conclusion

Following these five tips ensures that your data is healthy and meets the organization’s needs. Data governance principles provide a framework for managing your data effectively, while regular data cleaning helps to keep your data accurate and up-to-date. Data security is critical to protect against hackers and data loss, and having a disaster recovery plan in place will help you recover from any unexpected incidents.