Informatica on the best way to ensure enterprise data integrity

It is important to treat enterprise data like an important asset. Like with significant capital and operational investment, companies should make an inventory of its data, assess its value and maximize its use, said Steve Holyer, Data Security and Data Governance Specialist at Informatica. It is also important to understand that executives make key business decisions based on this data, meaning it needs to be accurate and consistent to ensure decisions can be made with peace of mind.
 
From the day it is created, data undergoes different events throughout its lifecycle. “It’s likely to be modified and updated on numerous occasions having passed through multiple systems. Each new touchpoint, whether that’s a human interaction, compromised hardware, data transfer or virus can compromise your data’s integrity,” he said.
 
This is why data integrity must be a priority for enterprises, starting with the initial design of the data systems and throughout the lifecycle of the data. Doing so makes it easier to protect the accuracy and consistency of the data, which helps maintain the stability and performance of the enterprise.
 
However, this is not a simple task, in fact, it is quite the challenge. There are many steps involved which include: thinking about how the technology within a business can interlink; how data is passed to minimize data integration risk; and how a system might recover from and correct errors in the data that comes from technology.
 

“Data integrity starts at the beginning of your project when you design the database and its standard rules, and its efficacy is sustained through ongoing validation and error detection schedules,” Holyer explained. Data integrity needs to be part of a thoughtful process, not afterthought, as happens in many organizations. This is achieved, he said, through establishing practices at the outset around data cleaning and maintenance; good and ongoing training around data entering; making all users accountable for good data quality; and establishing robust data validation rules to control the values that can be entered into their system.
 
Many of the tools needed to ensure data integrity can be incorporated into a company’s hardware solutions. However, software solutions also play a major role. One example is through data governance.
 
To ensure good data governance, companies need to look at the “collecting of data, revising and standardizing it, and making it good for use,” Holyer said. Good data governance can then ensure an organization’s information assets are “formally, properly, proactively and efficiently managed throughout the enterprise to secure its trust and accountability.” 

It can also ensure critical data is available at the right time to the right person, in a standardized and reliable form. In turn, this can improve productivity and efficiency in an organization and help to maintain data integrity.
 
Holyer pointed to other software-based solutions that can also help enterprises ensure data integrity, such as an enterprise data catalog and data deletion solutions.
 
Using an enterprise data catalog, such as Informatica’s machine-learning-based data catalog, allows an organization to organize and classify data across different departments, applications and data warehouses; whether they be on-premises or on the cloud. It also provides enterprises with a comprehensive overview of all its data assets.
 
Data deletion solutions are also crucial since the amount of data gathered multiplies on a daily basis. This is not only a problem in terms of sheer volume, but also in terms of data integrity — with an endless amount of data coming in, maintaining the accuracy and consistency of that data becomes increasingly difficult. Without a comprehensive strategy to deal with data volumes, Holyer said the costs associated with managing the data for your applications portfolio and its required infrastructure could put a burden on an enterprise’s IT budget,