The Role of Data Governance in an Organization - Data Governance: Creating Value from Information Assets - page 15

organizations to lease shared hardware/software facilities over a network.
It allows an organization to reduce costs and changes the way IT resources
are used. However, cloud computing also creates new risks and challenges
for data governance. Cloud computing can offer software, data storage,
or development and hosting of customized applications in the cloud over
either a public or private network. However, it is found that cloud archi-
tectures often lack formal standards on how data is manipulated in the
cloud environment.
Common risks and governance issues associated with cloud computing
(Blair, 2010) include :
• Availability of information: This relates to challenges to access the
organization's information and an understanding of the disaster
recovery plan and resiliency of the provider's infrastructure.
• Electronic-discovery requirements: This relates to how easy it is to
search within an individual or multiple cloud computing environ-
ment for information. Complex search protocols may create perfor-
mance issues and increase costs.
• Retention requirements: This relates to how information retention
and disposition periods are enforced through either the cloud-based
application or data storage.
• Privacy requirements: This relates to how personally identifiable
information is secured and protected.
• Portability of information: This relates to the ease with which infor-
mation can be transferred from one cloud provider to another. Lack
of adherence to common standards increases risk here.
These issues can be mitigated to some extent by explicitly addressing
them in the contract with the cloud computing vendor.
CONCLUSION
The digital world has led to an exponential growth in both the volume
and detail of information that can be captured. The McKinsey Global
Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will
grow 44-fold between 2009 and 2020. Big data, which is information
gleaned from nontraditional sources such as blogs, social media, email,