Data management is a method that involves establishing and enforcing processes, policies and procedures to handle data throughout its entire lifecycle. It makes sure that data is available and useful, assists in regulatory compliance and informed decision-making, and ultimately provides an advantage to businesses.

The importance of effective data management has grown significantly as organizations automate their business processes, leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and deploy data warehouses, among other initiatives. The result is a flood of data that needs to be consolidated, and then delivered to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for advanced insights.

Without a clear data management plan, businesses could end up with data silos that are not compatible and inconsistent data sets, which hinder the ability to operate business intelligence and analytics applications. Inadequate data management can affect the trust of customers and employees.

To meet these challenges companies need to develop a data-management strategy (DMP), which includes the processes and people needed to manage all kinds of data. For example, a DMP can assist researchers in determining the file name conventions they should employ to structure data sets to ensure long-term storage as well as easy access. It can also contain an data workflow that specifies the steps needed for cleansing, testing and integrating raw and refined data sets in order to make them suitable for analysis.

A DMP can be utilized by companies that collect consumer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws on a global and state scale, such as the General Data https://taeglichedata.de/maintaining-data-processes-throughout-the-information-lifecycle Protection Regulation of the European Union or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can also help guide the development of procedures and policies to deal with security threats to data and audits.