The Benefits of a Data Audit

A data audit is a comprehensive process that allows you to find inactive data, eliminate the silos of data, and also comply with data-related regulations like GDPR. It requires an https://datafinest.pro/2023/05/13/the-importance-of-a-data-audit/ exhaustive list of all the data within your organization including its locations as well as cloud applications. It also covers any sensitive data stored by your organisation, whether that’s personally identifying information or critical business information.

It is crucial to ensure that all departments are included in the process of discovery, to be aware of how their actions could affect the integrity and availability of data. It’s also a great chance to foster collaboration between departments, since they will need to align their auditing and management practices. For instance, they will need to be able to agree on how to label data fields (e.g. Customer name versus full name to avoid confusion.

Another benefit of conducting a data audit is that it helps detect costly, but accidental mistakes that employees make when handling sensitive information. These errors are usually caused by inadequate training or to ignorance of how to properly manage data. By creating the concept of a data audit trail you can track and flag these mistakes and help your employees to use the best practices to keep your company’s data secure.

When you conduct an audit of your data it is possible to ensure that your data is not duplicated, consistent and accurate, which will eventually allow you to have a single customer view that you can be confident in. As a result, you can accelerate the speed of your analytics initiatives and improve your business processes with an efficient and effective data strategy.