Data Integrity Best Practices

In March 2016, a demolition crew in Rowlett, Texas followed directions from Google Maps to a home owned by Ms. Diaz and proceeded to demolish it. Unfortunately it was the wrong house. The crew blamed Google, and the company indeed admitted there was a data error in Maps.

Lack of data integrity may not only cost your company money – it may wreak all kinds of havoc in your business and worse, the lives of your customers. Read on to learn how to move from messy, corrupted data to clean, reliable data that will enable better decisions and safeguard your company’s reputation.

First, what is data integrity?

Data integrity refers to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, and consistency of your data. Accurate data is free of errors such as the one in Google Maps. . Complete data has all the necessary pieces you need, such as customer emails and customer addresses. Reliable data stays stable, giving you the same results time after time. And consistent data is represented the same way across different systems. Below are five key ways to stay on top of data integrity.

How do you plan to collect, store, and access data? How will you protect it from unauthorised access? Who is authorised to view, edit, or delete it? A data governance policy is a collaborative effort across your organisation, and creating one is time well spent. Once your data governance policy is in place you can use it to train your employees about how to manage data and who is responsible for it.

Your recovery plan can cover all types of disruption, such as hardware failure, cyberattacks, and human error. Here are the key things to include in a good recovery plan:

• Identify the key personnel that will be involved in recovery. These are the people who will help put together your data recovery plan. They usually come from executive management, business operations, and IT.
• Define your recovery time. Your objective recovery time is the maximum amount of time it should take you to restore your data after a loss or breach.
• List your disaster recovery location. Also known as your backup site, this is a remote data centre that you can use until your local data is restored. Identify your mission-critical, sensitive, and regulated data. Critical data may be your customer data and employee data. Data that, if disclosed, would cause harm to individuals is generally considered sensitive; for example, social security numbers. And regulated data is defined by applicable laws and regulations.
• Document your communication plan in case of a disaster. Who will participate in your disaster communication plan? Who will act as the disaster manager? Which stakeholders will be notified and when? When does the public need to be notified and by whom?

Your data can be damaged by a power outage, design failure, human error, or data breach. Audits and regular backups keep you prepared for the unexpected.

• Back up data regularly: Salesforce research has found that only 39% of IT decision-makers use backup and restore solutions, a gaping hole in an IT leader’s arsenal of tools. A data backup will protect your organisation from permanent loss because your data will be copied and can be recovered. You can be strategic about which data you want to back up automatically, such as regulated and high-value data.
• Enforce audit logs: An audit log lists the events and changes that happen in your systems and the time they happen. An audit trail is a series of audit logs. Audit logs keep you compliant with industry regulations such as CIS and help you reconstruct events in case of a disaster.

With so many options on the market today, choosing one can be tricky. Use this table as a guide to the most important technologies that will help get your data in order.

Every employee plays a role in maintaining good data hygiene. Once you implement your policies for data governance and health, provide your employees with the appropriate training. Make sure they understand their roles and responsibilities, and keep the training top of mind with frequent reminders.

Staying on top of data integrity will pay off by saving you hours in productivity, giving you data you can trust to make better decisions, and enhancing your reputation with customers and partners.