Global Data Considerations: Legal and regulatory Requirements

Data Protection and Privacy Requirements

Data protection and privacy, which has for some time been on EU members’ risk radar, is increasingly a global challenge that vexes conscientious risk managers. An insurance company’s data warehouse, for example, needs to be able to able to recognise and adapt to the limitations that countries place upon the transportation and utilisation of data.

Archiving Requirements
Ensuring that your data warehouse is utilising and storing the appropriate amount of historic data is vital. It is important from a number of different perspectives, including:
• For data protection
• For external data permissions
• To maintain data warehouse performance

Data Security and Permissions
Your data warehouse needs to recognise from the early steps that different people are going to require different levels of access to data. This needs to be a solution selection criterion.

Self Service
The ability for the information user to be able to explore with the minimum involvement of IT is vital for organisations that want to embed information-led decision making into their culture.

Technical Considerations
There are numerous technical considerations that your IT team will consider as part of the solution design and selection. Some of the important ones include things like:
• Data volume and capacity requirements
• Network latency between data centre and information users
• Data replication and backup
• Disaster recovery and business continuity requirements

Step 2 – Expansion
Having demonstrated value in Step 1, Step 2 Expands the scope and the information available. It is likely that Step 2 will be a series of steps that expand the scope in “bite size chunks.” In many ways this iterates Step 1, however, as the expansion continues there will be more requirements to introduce the following:

Business Process Orientated Improvement
There will be areas of the business that need to change in order to either collect data to feed into the data warehouse, or that will change as a result of the information that is being provided by the Data Warehouse. In my next blog I will look at data quality improvement and conclude my Step 2 approach to improving the value of your data.