Imagine opening a Power BI dashboard to review last quarter’s sales, only to spot conflicting numbers, duplicated customer names, and missing revenue from one entire region. This makes everyone lose trust in the reported data and prevents management from making decisions based on it. This is exactly what happens when an organisation does not have a data governance roadmap.
In the world of data-driven decision making, data governance acts as the backbone of trusted analytics. It ensures that definitions are consistent, data sources are secure and traceable, and decision-makers aren’t second-guessing the integrity of their insights. Whether you’re tracking product performance, setting sales targets, or managing incentives, governed data ensures that everyone is looking at a single source of truth.
In the next section, we’ll explore the key pillars that form the foundation of effective data governance.
The 4 pillars of data governance are data quality, data stewardship, data protection and data management.
Ensures the data is accurate, consistent, and useful. Poor data quality can lead to bad decisions, especially in BI reports or dashboards.
Involves assigning clear responsibility to individuals or teams who manage and enforce data policies and standards across systems.
Focuses on keeping data safe from unauthorised access, breaches, or misuse. This includes compliance with privacy laws and security protocols.
Covers the full lifecycle of data, including how it’s collected, stored, integrated, and maintained over time for effective access and usage.
It is recommended to use an objective framework to achieve data governance. The DAMA-DMBOK framework (from the Data Management Association) provides a clear guide on how to manage and govern data in a company. Let’s break it down into simple steps:
Start by evaluating how well your organisation currently handles data and what tools are used, e.g. Power BI, Azure SQL Server, etc. This also means looking at things like data quality, consistency, security, and usage across departments.
Once you know where you stand, pinpoint the weak spots—maybe there’s no clear data ownership, or reports are pulling conflicting numbers. These gaps will help shape your improvement plan.
Create a clear, step-by-step plan for strengthening your data governance. It should include short- and long-term goals, timelines, and key milestones.
Designate people like data stewards, owners, and IT leads who will be accountable for maintaining data quality and governance standards.
Make sure everyone understands their role in managing and using data responsibly. Offer training on best practices, tools (like Power BI), and governance policies.
Keep track of how things are improving. Use metrics, dashboards, or audits to measure data quality, compliance, and overall effectiveness of your governance framework.
Your data governance journey depends on the tools you already use, like Power BI, Salesforce, Snowflake, or Databricks. Choose governance solutions that fit into your existing technology stack for easy integration and better results.
Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) contributes to the data protection pillar in your data governance strategy. Especially with remote teams and global contractors, VPNs ensure that only authorised users can access internal resources like virtual machines or databases, but only when connected through a secure VPN. This encryption and access control help protect data in transit from cyberattacks, breaches, and unauthorised use.
VPNs play a vital role in strengthening data governance, especially when:
As noted in Cybernews’ Surfshark VPN review, security tools like these offer cutting-edge encryption protocols, robust security features, antivirus bundles, and no-logs policies, providing companies, especially those working with large amounts of data, an extra layer of protection.
With a VPN, External users can access your systems only through a secure, encrypted connection, and It adds a layer of defence that keeps malicious actors out. It also protects data in transit and reduces exposure to attacks.
For example, you can set up access controls so that only users connected via VPN can reach your VMs or databases. This simple setup greatly reduces the risk of unauthorised access.
As part of our Power BI consulting services, we advise clients on how to keep that data safe and use it the right way. Data governance in Power BI means managing who can see and use the data, keeping private information secure, and making sure everyone can trust the reports they see.
Whether you’re new to Power BI or want to make your setup more secure, here’s an easy-to-follow plan to help you manage your data properly. Before setting up governance rules, it’s important to know where your data goes and how it’s secured. Power BI uses robust security models and encryption methods to protect your data in transit and at rest.
You can read Microsoft’s official guide here: What happens to your data in Power BI
Power BI allows you to assign different roles to workspace users, such as:
Assigning an appropriate user role is a part of the data stewardship since this clarifies who is responsible for maintaining Power BI resources. You can read our Power BI Service guide for step-by-step instructions of assigning user roles.
With Row-Level Security, you can control what data a user sees in a report, even if the report is shared with multiple people.
For example:
This ensures that sensitive information is shared only with the right audience and influences the data protection pillar.
If your data is highly sensitive or subject to strict regulations, storing it in the cloud might not be an option. In that case, Power BI Report Server allows you to keep your data on-premises, while still using the familiar Power BI interface to create and share reports.
This helps an organisation to ensure that the data does not get moved to servers that are outside of their control.
As your Power BI environment grows, it becomes harder to know which reports or datasets are trustworthy. Use content endorsement to mark important or high-quality reports as:
This helps users find the most reliable content and avoid duplicate or outdated reports.
Finally, use Power BI Admin Portal and Usage Metrics to track:
This data helps you improve content, retire unused reports, and ensure your governance policies are working.
By following this roadmap, managing access, applying RLS, using on-premises options when needed, endorsing content, and monitoring usage, you’ll have a strong foundation for secure, reliable data-driven decisions.
SharePoint is very often the data source of choice for data analytics due to its reputation for data protection and management. However, sometimes it needs further configurations for stronger data governance. Good governance in SharePoint means making sure data is properly accessed, retained, monitored, and compliant with regulations like GDPR.
Below you can find some basic data governance advice that we share to our SharePoint consulting clients.
Microsoft SharePoint helps with data management by automatically generating data access governance reports. These reports help highlight potential data security risks. There are 3 reports:
The sharing links report shows the specific files that can be accessed by anyone with the link, anyone in the organisation and only specific people. As a result, the organisations can quickly see if any sensitive files have an inappropriate level of access assigned to them.
In SharePoint, a sensitivity label can be applied to certain files to let the users know that the file contains sensitive data and encrypt the files. SharePoint also helps to generate reports where you can see which content has a sensitivity label applied to it.
Finally, a separate report can be run on SharePoint to identify which files are shared with everyone except external users. The IT department can then decide whether the level of access is appropriately assigned and take action accordingly.
Not all data needs to be kept forever. By default, SharePoint keeps the user’s OneDrive content for 5 years, after which it is deleted automatically. Similarly, emails on outlook are automatically deleted after 10 years.
SharePoint admins can configure retention rules to keep the data for longer or shorter periods. For example, a SharePoint admin can decide that the files owned by C-suite users should be retained for longer, whereas the files owned by junior staff should be deleted earlier. You can also apply similar settings to inactive mailboxes.
After a policy is created, SharePoint also allows to create a preservation lock to restrict changes to the policies for a certain time period. This is especially useful when an old security administrator leaves the company and a new one joins.
SharePoint keeps audit logs for key events like file views, edits, deletions and restorations, changes to account permissions and deleting log data. If your files get unexpectedly deleted, the audit log helps to identify who was responsible for it and recover the lost files.
Audit reports are also important to monitor if all the users are reading the essential content. For example, it can be used to monitor which users have accessed training materials on user guidance.
If your company handles personal data of EU residents, GDPR applies. SharePoint includes several features to support GDPR compliance, such as:
These tools, when configured properly, can help you demonstrate compliance and respond to legal or privacy concerns efficiently.
This article helps us understand the importance of data governance in managing and protecting business information. It explains how building trust, staying compliant, and making smart decisions all start with getting the basics right, keeping data accurate, secure, and well-organised. Using frameworks like DAMA-DMBOK gives structure to this process, helping identify what’s missing and guiding policy decisions.
It also highlights how tools like Power BI and SharePoint play a major role through role assignments, security settings, and access controls. Adding VPNs strengthens protection for external access. Together, these strategies create a clear, secure path for using data effectively.
If you need help with data governance, data analytics, or using tools like Power BI, you can reach out to us now. We helped many businesses set up Power BI with strong data governance in place.
