Ignoring proper data management can lead to severe security risks, including cyberattacks and data breaches, especially in the age of AI. A strong governance framework is essential to safeguard sensitive information, ensure compliance, and protect against evolving threats in today’s digital landscape.
According to Gartner, 80% of organizations aiming to scale their digital business will fail because they lack a robust data governance strategy. The future of your business depends on how well you manage your data and information today. Two key concepts that have gained prominence are data governance and information governance.
Data Governance focuses on managing structured data as a strategic asset, ensuring its quality, accuracy, consistency, and security. Information Governance encompasses a broader scope, managing all types of information—both structured and unstructured—across an organization’s lifecycle.
As of 2025, over 70% of organizations recognize the importance of data governance in enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency, while 60% acknowledge the need for comprehensive information governance to manage risks and ensure regulatory compliance.
What is Data Governance?
Data governance is the framework that ensures data is managed, secured, and utilized effectively throughout its lifecycle within an organization. It involves creating policies, procedures, and roles to ensure that data is accurate, consistent, and accessible, while also ensuring compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
Core Principles
- Data Quality – Providing accurate and reliable data for decision-making.
- User Data Security – Detecting user actions and preventing unauthorized access or breaches
- Data Stewardship – Designating individuals or teams to be responsible for the integrity and quality of the data.
- Data Access and Compliance: Ensuring that the right people have access to the right data at the right time, while maintaining compliance with laws like GDPR.
Data governance creates a foundation for efficient data usage and enhances transparency, trust, and security, which ultimately empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions.
What is Information Governance?
Information governance refers to the policies, procedures, and controls an organization uses to manage and protect its information assets throughout its lifecycle. It seeks to ensure that all types of information are managed securely, responsibly, and in accordance with all relevant regulations and business needs.
Core Principles
- Security and Compliance: The information is secured during storage and transfer and complies with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific standards.
- Access Control: Determining and enforcing who may access, modify, and delete information so that minimum risks are taken, and data privacy is maintained
- Retention and Disposal: By knowing the retention schedules of various types of information, obsolete data can be properly disposed of.
- Accountability and Transparency: Delivering a clear audit trail of information handling activities provides accountability if challenged legally or by forensic inquiry.
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Here’s the distinction
- The Data Governance is primarily managing data (structure) to ensure its integrity, security, accessibility, etc. This encompasses everything from data dictionaries to data entry standards and access control.
- On the other hand, Information Governance manages all the data within an organization, such as emails, document files, videos, images, etc. This can range from implementing document management systems to establishing policies for information lifecycle management or ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
Although data governance is mainly focused on structured data, information governance takes a broader approach to managing all types of organizational information. Both are key to mitigating risks and driving efficiency.
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Here’s a comprehensive comparison between Data Governance and Information Governance in tabular form:
| Definition | Management of structured data to ensure quality, security, and accessibility. | Management of both structured and unstructured data throughout its lifecycle. |
| Scope | Focuses on structured data (e.g., databases, spreadsheets). | Encompasses both structured data and unstructured data (e.g., documents, emails). |
| Primary Focus | Ensures the accuracy, quality, and usability of data. | Ensures the integrity, privacy, and compliance of all information. |
| Key Components | Data quality, data access, data security, metadata management. | Information lifecycle management, compliance, retention policies. |
| Data Types Covered | Primarily structured data. | Structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. |
| Governance Objective | Ensures data accuracy, reliability, and consistency. | Focuses on the legal, regulatory, and compliance aspects of information. |
| Key Roles | Data stewards, data owners, data analysts. | Information stewards, compliance officers, records managers. |
| Regulatory Focus | Primarily focused on data privacy and protection (e.g., GDPR, CCPA). | Covers a wider range of legal requirements including records management and archival laws. |
| Implementation | Focuses on the technology and processes to manage data assets. | Includes both technology and policies for managing the entire lifecycle of information. |
| Technology Tools | Uses data management tools, data catalogs, and analytics platforms. | Uses document management systems, content management systems, and compliance tools. |
| Data Lifecycle | Mainly focused on the data creation, storage, processing, and analytics stages. | Manages the entire information lifecycle, including creation, usage, retention, and destruction. |
| Compliance | Ensures data is handled in accordance with privacy and security laws. | Enforces compliance with industry-specific regulations and information lifecycle requirements. |
| Focus on Unstructured Data | Limited to structured data, with minimal focus on unstructured data. | Fully incorporates unstructured data like documents, emails, and multimedia files. |
| Decision-Making | Ensures high-quality data for informed decision-making. | Ensures reliable information governance, which supports business decisions and regulatory compliance. |
| Security Focus | Data encryption, access control, data protection. | Broader security policies for all forms of information, including document retention and destruction rules. |
| Data Retention | Not always concerned with retention; more focused on usage and accessibility. | Critical aspect of information governance, including retention periods and proper disposal of outdated information. |
| Examples | Financial data, customer databases, CRM data. | Legal documents, email archives, contracts, employee records. |
1. Scope
- Data Governance: Data governance is limited primarily to structured data—data that is highly organized and easily stored in rows and columns (such as databases and data warehouses). Structured data typically forms the foundation for analytics, reporting, and decision-making.
- Information Governance: Information governance spans both structured and unstructured data. It encompasses all types of information that can be used, stored, processed, and managed within an organization. This includes unstructured data types such as emails, scanned documents, contracts, and multimedia.
2. Primary Focus
- Data Governance: The primary goal of data governance is to ensure data quality, integrity, and usability. This means ensuring that the data is accurate, consistent, complete, and easily accessible for analytical purposes. It’s also concerned with maintaining security and privacy in data storage and usage.
- Information Governance: Information governance focuses on the integrity, privacy, and compliance of all types of information, whether structured or unstructured. This includes maintaining legal compliance with information management practices and ensuring proper handling of records, regardless of their format.
3. Key Components
Data Governance: Key components of data governance include:
- Data quality management: Ensuring the data is clean, accurate, and fit for use.
- Data access and security: Implementing controls and protocols to protect data from unauthorized access.
- Metadata management: Creating and managing a metadata repository that describes the structure and usage of data.
- Data stewardship: Assigning responsibility for managing data assets across the organization.
- Information Governance: Information governance involves:
- Policy development: Creating policies for managing and securing all information, including email and physical documents.
- Lifecycle management: Managing the entire lifecycle of information from creation, usage, and storage, to archival and disposal.
- Compliance: Ensuring that information is handled in accordance with laws and industry regulations.
- Security and privacy controls: Enforcing robust measures to safeguard information and protect sensitive data.
4. Data Types Covered
- Data Governance: Data governance is primarily concerned with structured data, including business transaction data, customer databases, spreadsheets, and any other data that can be organized into structured formats like rows and columns.
- Information Governance: Information governance includes all types of information: structured data as well as unstructured data. Unstructured data includes content like documents, emails, audio/video files, and images, which require different management strategies and tools for classification and retrieval.
5. Governance Objective
- Data Governance: The main objective of data governance is to ensure that the data is accurate, reliable, and accessible. Data governance aims to enhance data quality and enable organizations to derive meaningful insights from this high-quality data for decision-making.
- Information Governance: The primary objective of information governance is to ensure the integrity, compliance, and accessibility of all organizational information, ensuring it is handled according to regulatory requirements and organizational policies.
6. Key Roles
Data Governance: Key roles in data governance include:
- Data Stewards: Individuals responsible for maintaining data quality, defining data policies, and ensuring compliance.
- Data Owners: People who have ownership and accountability for specific data domains.
- Data Analysts: People who use data to derive insights and assist in decision-making.
Information Governance: Key roles in information governance include:
- Information Stewards: Oversee the governance of various information assets across the organization, ensuring compliance and security.
- Compliance Officers: Ensure the organization’s information practices are in line with relevant legal and regulatory frameworks.
- Records Managers: Responsible for managing documents and ensuring proper archiving and disposal practices.
7. Regulatory Focus
- Data Governance: In data governance, the primary regulatory focus is on data privacy and data security, with compliance standards like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) focusing on safeguarding data.
- Information Governance: Information governance involves broader legal and regulatory compliance, including industry-specific regulations. It manages the entire information lifecycle, ensuring compliance with records management, archiving laws, and data retention policies.
8. Implementation
- Data Governance: Data governance typically focuses on the IT infrastructure needed to manage data assets. It involves tools like data catalogs, data quality management platforms, and metadata management systems to ensure the effective management of structured data.
- Information Governance: Information governance requires policies and procedures that deal with the entire lifecycle of information, including documents and digital content management. Tools such as document management systems (DMS), enterprise content management (ECM) systems, and compliance solutions are commonly used.
9. Technology Tools
- Data Governance: Data governance tools are designed for the management of data quality, metadata, security, and compliance. Common tools include Informatica, Collibra, and Alation.
- Information Governance: Information governance tools cater to the management of unstructured data and documents. Examples include OpenText, SharePoint, and M-Files, which allow businesses to handle documents, images, emails, and other types of unstructured data effectively.
10. Data Lifecycle
- Data Governance: Data governance focuses on data creation, data entry, data processing, and data usage. It ensures that structured data is accurate and ready for analysis.
- Information Governance: Information governance encompasses the entire information lifecycle, including how information is created, stored, archived, and eventually disposed of or deleted when it is no longer required or relevant.
11. Compliance
- Data Governance: Data governance deals mainly with compliance regarding data privacy laws and data security, ensuring that organizational data adheres to privacy and protection standards like GDPR, HIPAA, etc.
- Information Governance: Information governance deals with compliance around records retention, legal document preservation, and adherence to industry-specific regulations, ensuring that all information (structured and unstructured) complies with local and international standards.
12. Focus on Unstructured Data
- Data Governance: Data governance traditionally focuses less on unstructured data (e.g., emails, images, audio), though the need to manage such data is growing as more unstructured data becomes critical for analytics.
- Information Governance: Information governance includes full management of unstructured data such as emails, documents, contracts, and multimedia. Effective governance ensures that all types of information are securely handled and accessible for audit and compliance purposes.
13. Decision-Making
- Data Governance: Data governance ensures that data is accurate, consistent, and accessible for decision-making processes. It enables the efficient use of data for operational decisions, reporting, and forecasting.
- Information Governance: Information governance ensures that information across the enterprise is well-maintained and securely available, supporting decisions based on both structured and unstructured information, ensuring regulatory compliance and information integrity.
14. Security
- Data Governance: Data governance primarily focuses on securing data against unauthorized access or breach. It involves the use of encryption, access control policies, and data masking.
- Information Governance: Information governance focuses on securing all forms of information, ensuring protection for sensitive records, ensuring data is archived in compliance with retention policies, and managing accessibility based on legal requirements.
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Implementing Data Governance
Here are key steps for successfully approaching and implementing data governance in your organization:
- Establish a Data Governance Council: Form a cross-team team that includes representatives from all teams. The council would be responsible for the data governance framework, policies, and standards and would ensure they align with business goals.
- Identify Critical Data Elements: Identify your organization’s most critical data elements: customer, financial, and operational data. How can we prioritize governance efforts so that we cover what is possibly the most impactful data?
- Define Data Quality Metrics: Set and formalize data quality standards across your organization. Establish metrics to measure the quality of data, such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, and timeliness of the data.
- Create a Data Dictionary and Catalog: Develop a data dictionary and catalog that describes the availability of data, their meaning, where they are located, and who owns them. That keeps everyone on the same page across the organization.
- Implement Data Stewardship: Data Stewards are responsible for the integrity and quality of your data. These people are responsible for that proper handling and maintenance procedures are followed.
- Develop and Implement Data Policies and Procedures: Create data-oriented governance policies on privacy, security, access controls, usage, and archiving. Establish clear and enforceable policies for data management processes.
Information governance goes beyond data governance and includes managing all types of information, such as documents, emails, and multimedia. Here’s how to implement it effectively:
- Establish an Information Governance Committee: Create a cross-functional governance committee with representation from multiple departments. The Committee will build and maintain the information governance framework, policies, and standards to be consistent and aligned with the whole organization.
- Carry out an Information Audit: This encompasses knowing where information is stored, who owns it, and how it’s currently being governed.
- Develop an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Policy: Formulate a policy that will guide the entire lifecycle of information. It covers how it is created, used, stored, archived, and disposed of. Then, implement a policy that matches the business needs and meets the regulatory requirements.
- Implement Information Security Measures: Implement strict security measures to safeguard your important information from unauthorized access, modification, or destruction. This may involve encryption, access controls, and frequent security audits.
- Create Retention and Disposal Schedules: Establish clear guidelines for how long different types of information should be retained. Establish schedules for when information is to be archived or deleted based on organizational policy and regulatory requirements.
These data governance and information governance frameworks enable organizations to handle and access information bi-directionally while ensuring compliance and practicality in their work environment.
Effective data and information management strategies require understanding when to implement data governance, information governance, or a combination of both. Here’s how you can decide:
Consider Implementing Data Governance When
- You are seeing quality issues in the data impacting decision-making or operations.
- You find it difficult to combine data from separate systems or departments.
- Your organization needs to maintain consistent and accurate data throughout its lifecycle.
Consider Implementing Information Governance When
- You are working with a lot of unstructured data (e.g., emails or documents), which is difficult to manage.
- There are concerns that you may not meet legal or regulatory information management obligations.
- You are dealing with concerns around the security or privacy of information outside of structured data (e.g., digital files, records, contracts).
When to Implement Both
However, for most organizations, data governance and information governance are both areas that need to be strategically implemented. There is some overlap, but there are important aspects of managing and using data and information that the other does not cover.
Using both ensures that all your data and information is managed effectively and securely and meets all requirements.
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In the broader context of data governance and information governance, those two frameworks are inextricably interlinked and aligned, and they positively affect an organization’s ability to govern data and information. Here’s how they complement each other:
1. Complementary Frameworks
Data Governance pertains to managing the quality, privacy, security, and access of structured data (e.g. databases, spreadsheets, and transactional data). Also, it involves establishing policies or procedures to ensure data is accurate, reliable, and appropriately used within an organization.
Information Governance includes structured and unstructured data (e.g., emails, documents, images). It regulates the complete information lifecycle, preserving all data types’ of compliance, privacy, and security.
Together, they offer a holistic approach to managing data and information from creation through its entire lifecycle until its final disposition.
2. Aligning the Frameworks
Data governance focuses on structured data, such as customer or financial data, while information governance covers unstructured data, such as email or digital documents. Moreover, aligning these domains allows organizations to evaluate processes, mitigate risks, and decrease resource use.
3. Successful Integration
Microsoft and IBM are examples of organizations that have successfully implemented both frameworks. Alsohis ensures consistency in the strategy that encompasses not just data accuracy and security but also the lifecycle management of all business information. For example, Microsoft links data governance principles to the overall information governance framework (the big picture), allowing organizations to apply unified data management and security solutions.
4. Benefits of a Unified Approach
- Security and compliance: A unified approach allows for enhanced security measures and ensures compliance with various regulations (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA etc.) can be applied across data and information types.
- Better Accessibility: A full-fledged governance model makes the structured and unstructured data accessible when required, which improves decision-making capability and helps enhance business efficiency.
- Operational Efficiency: Aligning both governance strategies helps eliminate duplications, reduce risks, and make data management processes across departments more efficient, thereby leveraging greater operational efficiency.
Combining both approaches helps organizations protect their assets, remain compliant, and make informed strategic decisions based on data and information.
Data Governance Examples
1. Healthcare Industry: Electronic Health Records (EHR) Management
Data governance practices help ensure that patient data is accurate, consistent, and accessible by authorized personnel. To ensure that high-quality data are collected, stored, and protected, hospitals have implemented both data quality standards and data stewardship programs.
- Tools Used: Data lineage solutions, security and governance tapes, and access control.
2. Retail Industry: Customer Data Management
Data governance ensures that customer data collected from different touchpoints (such as websites) is accurate, consistent, and compliant with privacy regulations (such as GDPR). By implementing data stewardship roles and establishing clear metrics for what constitutes data quality, the customer data used for personalization is clear and actionable.
- Tools used: CRM systems, Data quality management tools, Master data management platforms
3. Finance Industry: Regulatory Compliance
Financial institutions deal with sensitive financial data, including but not limited to transaction records, bank account information, and investment records. Data governance ensures that this data is accurate, consistently tracked, and compliant with financial regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley or MiFID II.
Tools Used: Data integration tools, Compliance management software, Business intelligence tools
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Information Governance Examples
1. Legal Industry: Document and Records Management
Information governance files records correctly, ensures compliance with retention laws, and securely destroys them when no longer needed. Legal departments set retention schedules to meet privacy and regulatory requirements.
- Tools Used: Document management, records retention, compliance tracking
2. Public Sector: Government Records Management
Government organizations collect and manage huge amounts of information, including citizen records, government contracts, policy documents, and other public records. These records need to be kept safe and accessible to proper personnel and have to comply with data retention and privacy laws imposed by the government (FOIA compliance in the USA, for example, FOIA compliance in the USA).
- Tools Used: Records management systems, compliance software, information lifecycle management tools.
3. Corporate Sector: Employee Data Management
Organizations handle sensitive employee data, including resumes, personal identification documents, payroll records, and performance reviews. Information governance ensures that this data is safe from unauthorized access and meets data privacy regulations like GDPR. It also ensures that employees’ private details are processed well and can only be accessed by authorized personnel.
- Tools Used: HRIS, Employee Record Management System, Security & Encryption Software
Both Governance Frameworks in Action
1. Insurance Industry: Claims and Policy Management
- Data Governance: Insurance companies gather customer claims, policies, and underwriting data. Data governance guarantees the integrity of this data in various systems, allowing the organization to make well-informed decisions regarding claims handling and policy administration.
- Information Governance: Insurers must manage sensitive customer information to comply with the law by classifying, retaining (according to legal requirements), and securely destroying information at the end of its retention period. Information governance tracks and monitors documents such as claim forms, contracts, policy documents, etc., throughout their cycle.
- Tools Used: Claims management systems, document management tools, retention scheduling software.
2. Education Sector: Student Information Systems
- Data Governance: Educational institutions (Schools, colleges, universities) deal with a high amount of student data (marks, attendance, schedules, etc) Data governance also ensures that student data is accurate, complete, and accessible to faculty, staff, and authorized students.
- Data Governance: Schools must also govern unstructured data like essays, examination papers, and internal correspondences.Information governance practices create and maintain records with appropriate classifiers, retention schedules, and data security, ensuring compliance with accreditation and legal standards.
- Tools used: Student information systems (SIS), learning management systems (LMS), document management systems.
Kanerika: Your Trusted Partner for Implementing Robust Data Governance Solutions
At Kanerika, we understand that effective data governance is the backbone of any successful data-driven organization. As businesses increasingly rely on data to drive decision-making, it becomes crucial to manage, secure, and ensure the integrity of that data. With rising concerns over data privacy, security, and compliance, businesses need comprehensive governance strategies to protect and manage their valuable data assets.
As a trusted Microsoft Data & AI Solutions Partner, we specialize in deploying Microsoft Purview to help organizations build secure, scalable, and compliant data governance frameworks. Our expertise in implementing Microsoft Purview ensures that businesses can manage their data effectively while adhering to regulatory requirements, enhancing security, and driving operational efficiency.
We craft customized data governance solutions that integrate industry-best practices and the latest technologies. From data privacy management to policy enforcement and data visibility, Kanerika provides the tools and expertise to ensure your data is both well-governed and strategically leveraged.
Partner with Kanerika to take control of your data governance processes. Together, we can build a future where your data is secure, compliant, and maximized for business success. Get in touch with us today to start your journey!
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