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Data governance is about making sure that data is secure and dealt with responsibly in accordance with applicable regulations. It is up to organizations to manage the integrity of the data in enterprise systems. It ensures compliance with existing governmental regulations as well as corporate policy about data usage. The goal is to ensure that data remains consistent and trustworthy and is not subject to abuse or misuse.
The profile of data governance has risen steadily as the regulations impacting the enterprise have multiplied. As well as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx), there are HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act), and PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). More recently, the picture has shifted with the EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). The consequences of violating GDPR, for example, can be severe.
Therefore, a good data governance program has become a necessity in large organizations, and increasingly in mid-sized enterprises. Such a program needs to be anchored in good IT-based data governance tools. These tools detect data inconsistencies in systems, data integrity issues, errors, and areas of violation of non-compliance.
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Data Governance Tools Selection Tips
Due to the extent and complexity of data governance systems, companies are understandably cautious when it comes to tool selection. Here are a few tips.
- Take your time: As data governance spills into so many areas of the enterprise and interfaces with so many other systems, it is important to not rush into any purchasing decision. The process used must include due diligence to pare down the number of candidates, detailed testing, and trial runs in your own environment.
- Treat the purchase as a business matter, not merely a technology buying decision. The tool selected must fit well with existing governance processes. Further, it must align well with ongoing compliance mandates and corporate policy.
- Focus on the big picture first. There are a million details to data governance. It is easy to get lost in them. Therefore, focus on key objectives and priorities first and once those are fulfilled, look to see which vendors best deal with any remaining issues.
Also read: Data Center Automation Will Enable the Next Phase of Digital Transformation
Top Data Governance Tools
There are many tools available. Some fall under the banner of risk management or enterprise risk management. Others are termed Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) or data governance. Here are some of the best data governance tools according to Enterprise Networking Planet, given in no particular order.
LogicGate
LogicGate’a Risk Cloud combines a no-code workflow builder with hands-on assistance from GRC experts. It helps risk managers and GRC professionals to understand related and connected compliance issues. It assists top management in creating, implementing, and tracking decision-making throughout the organization in one centralized place.
Key Differentiators
- Risks are identified, tracked, and mitigated.
- Tracking and response protocols are monitored and enforced.
- Identifies rules, regulations, and related compliance issues and program effectiveness.
- Coordinates issues with management and tracks risk remediation strategies across the enterprise.
- Keeps the organization up-to-date and compliant with relevant policies, laws, or regulations to protect assets and avoid violations, legal penalties, and fines.
- Helps prepare the organization to respond to cyberattacks.
- Ensure vendors and partners are compliant and don’t pose a potential liability.
- Align internal controls with standards, protocols, and regulations.
- Automate compliance processes.
- Ensures you are operating within the complex requirements of GDPR, CCPA, and other laws.
Archer 
Archer is part of security vendor RSA. It offers integrated risk management solutions to improve strategic decision making and operational resiliency. Archer helps organizations to understand risk holistically by engaging stakeholders, leveraging a platform that spans domains of risk and supports analysis driven by both business and IT impacts. The Archer customer base represents more than 1,500 deployments including more than 90 of the Fortune 100.
Key Differentiators
- Provides an aggregated view of risks to help ensure compliance, protect the business from disruption, and address risks related to new opportunities.
- Breaks down silos between entities, professional functions, and disparate risk evaluation tools.
- Conducts risk quantification analysis, monitor, and report on their risk management programs.
- Customizable risk reporting and monitoring.
- Accessible via desktop and mobile devices.
- Customizable key risk indicators to track emerging trends in risk exposure.
- Comparison of risk profiles and metrics across different entities, processes, products, and regions.
- Describes, integrates, and compares types of possible risk consequences from financial loss to health and safety.
- Collaborative brainstorming for fast development and assessment of risk.
- Builds risk models to evaluate organizational dependence on third parties.
Riskonnect
Riskonnect GRC software helps risk, compliance, and audit professionals share data, exchange knowledge, and collaborate on action. It brings everything to manage risk and compliance into one place. It encompasses the work done by departments like internal audit, compliance, risk, legal, finance, IT, HR as well as the lines of business, executive suite, and the board.
Key Differentiators
- Blends people, systems, and data from multiple sources.
- Operates on high-performing PaaS and SaaS environments.
- Offers answers on demand with almost no wait time for queries, searches, or analytics.
- Understands risks individually and collectively via a risk-correlation engine.
- Can be accessed by laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone.
- Works in 35 different languages out of the box – or customize your experience with more than 90 available languages.
Concentric
Concentric’s AI-based data access governance solution protects intellectual property, financial documents, PII/PCI content, customer data, business confidential data across on-premises and cloud-based data stores. The Concentric Semantic Intelligence Data Access Governance solution uses deep learning and Risk Distance analysis to accurately categorize data, assess risk, and remediate security issues.
Key Differentiators
- Protects data from ransomware attacks.
- Semantic Intelligence autonomously profiles data access and usage activities.
- Concentric’s Risk Distance analysis finds and remediates overshared, business-critical data, enabling least-privileges access policies that mitigate damage by limiting what can be accessed and encrypted by a compromised account.
- Risk Distance also detects unusual encryption activity and encryption artifacts to alert security professionals when a ransomware attack is in progress.
- Establishes zero-trust data access controls.
- Data discovery, categorization, and risk assessment.
- Discovers and remediates risk without writing a rule.
- Meet regulatory mandates for information barriers and access governance.
- Helps to avoid data loss.
SAP GRC
SAP’s GRC offering is composed of modules revolving around SAP HANA in-memory analytics. These modules include SAP Risk Management, SAP Process Control, SAP Audit Management, and SAP Business Integrity Screening. In-memory data access gives top of the line big data and predictive analytics capability that is tied to risk management. It enables organizations to automate and manage risks, controls, identities, cyber threats, and international trade across the enterprise with embedded analytics and artificial intelligence.
Key Differentiators
- Unify enterprise risk and control activities on a common technology platform, leveraging continuous monitoring for agile decision making.
- Links operations, risk management, compliance, and internal audit.
- Helps screen trading partners, reduce the risk of penalties and fines, and clear inbound and outbound customs quickly.
- Threat monitoring, data controlling, and privacy management.
- Monitors and manages identities and controls who has access to information and processes.
- Insight into how risk drivers can impact business value and reputation.
- Documents, assesses, tests, and remediates process risks and controls by streamlining enterprise compliance efforts and using best practice internal control processes.
- Streamlines internal audits by simplifying document evidence, organizing work papers, and creating reports.
- Screens large volumes of transactional data in real time based on predictive analyses and extensible rule sets that uncover anomalies, fraud, or deviations from policy.
SAI Global Compliance360
SAI360 is cloud-first software and ethics/compliance learning content designed to help organizations navigate risk. It can catalogue, monitor, update, notify, and manage a company’s operational GRC needs. By raising compliance and lowering risk, it also aims to reduce the possibility of levied fines.
Key Differentiators
- Extensible data model with configurable UI/forms, fields, relationships to extend solutions.
- Helps to easily modify or create new processes to automate and streamline risk, compliance, and audit activities.
- Out of the box settings, templates, and dashboards to visualize and analyze data.
- Preloaded frameworks, control libraries, and regulatory content along with values-based ethics and compliance learning content.
- Integration framework with APIs and other protocols to integrate with enterprise systems.
MetricStream
MetricStream’s products include regulatory compliance, IT and cyber security, third-party management, audit and financial controls, risk management, and integrated platform. They provide built-in regulatory content, best-practice workflows, AI-powered recommendations, mobile apps, and contextual tours.
Key Differentiators
- Addresses audits, contracts, financial control, legal, quality, compliance, performance, risk management, vendor governance, FDA compliance, trading surveillance, social compliance, quality assurance audit, and loss prevention.
- AI helps to simplify, automate, and streamline governance, risk, and compliance programs.
- Eliminates regulatory change hassles with real-time content from Thomson Reuters, issue and action recommendations, compliance and control certification, contextual intelligence on policies for greater confidence and insights.
- Cyber risk quantification capabilities with RiskLens integration and new loss exposure reports give insights into optimal IT and cybersecurity investments and resource allocation.
- Automatically risk score third parties based on anomalies in their SOC2 and SOC3 reports.
Galvanize
Galvanize by Diligent helps to strategically manage risk, demonstrate compliance, and provide executives with visibility, assurance, and confidence. It helps to reduce the cost of managing GRC programs and prevent errors with a unified platform.
Key Differentiators
- Pre-configured solutions designed to deliver GRC programs.
- Gain insights with analytics and storyboards.
- Connect tools in a unified platform to centralize and scale work.
- Connects data sources.
- Integrates, analyzes, and contextualizes metrics in real time.
- Inventory of risks, controls, third parties, audits in one place.
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