What is Modern Data Provisioning and Why Does Your Organization Need It?

By Pat Walsh, CMO at Privitar

Today’s leading businesses operate in a data-driven and privacy-conscious world. We see time and time again that the businesses outperforming their competitors are the ones taking advantage of insights that come from data. By using data appropriately, they gain customer trust and enhance their reputation. Their success comes from using data responsibly and innovating relentlessly while mitigating privacy risks and demonstrating trustworthiness.

All of this underscores the importance of taking a modern approach to data provisioning.

What is Modern Data Provisioning?

Privitar defines modern data provisioning as the combination of people, process, and technology required to enable responsible data use efficiently and effectively. The latest advances in technology come together with robust best-practice processes to ensure high-utility data reaches those who need it, at the right time, while managing risks effectively and demonstrating compliance with legal and other requirements.

Why is Taking a Modern Approach to Data Provisioning Important?

Today’s data provisioning processes are often complex and inefficient. Businesses are faced with the challenge of balancing regulatory compliance with the data access demands of stakeholders who need data for analytic applications, AI and ML initiatives, cloud computing, and more. Laws and regulations are changing rapidly, driving new requirements and business practices to combat privacy risks created by the mass gathering of personal information.

Alongside these challenges, we also now have a host of new tools and technologies available to help you safely utilize data.

In modern data provisioning, privacy and accountability are built directly into the provisioning process to optimize efficiency and accelerate access to data. This ensures a streamlined, end-to-end data provisioning process that brings to bear the latest privacy enhancing technologies.

Who Does Modern Data Provisioning Help?

A modern data provisioning ecosystem balances the needs of data owners who are responsible for the safety of data under their care, data consumers who require access to data for their analysis, data guardians who are responsible for the organization’s ethical and legal use of data, and business leaders who want to see value derived from the data their organization has collected. This is no small feat.

Data consumers such as business analysts and data scientists need access to the right data at the right time to provide insights that put their organizations ahead of the competition. Too often they struggle to locate data that is approved for use, or approval processes mean it takes too long to access data.

Modern data provisioning provides data consumers with a frictionless means to explore, request, preview and access data as quickly as possible.

Data owners like lines of business or operations teams who collect and share data in the course of their responsibilities know more than anyone about the data assets in their care. They need to publish datasets that give maximum utility with minimal risk, but face a challenge to manage this at scale especially as the technology and regulatory landscape shifts.

Modern data provisioning provides a streamlined process for data owners to share data products that make data searchable, meaningful, safe, and accessible for data consumers. Owners can track datasets under their care and enforce automated data protections that ensure data is used appropriately.

Data guardians, including compliance, risk and data officers, handle the review and approval processes to ensure only safe data is released, since they understand privacy laws and governance procedures. They face the challenge of enforcing standards across multiple systems while keeping pace with ever-changing regulations.

Modern data provisioning empowers data guardians with cross-functional workflows that promote and enhance safe data sharing across many stakeholders, transforming their role into a business enablement function.

How Else Does Modern Data Provisioning Benefit Businesses?

With a modern data provisioning ecosystem, stakeholders collaborate to maximize the economic value of data, generating growth while making safe what would otherwise be convoluted and risky processes. Organizations gain the agility to innovate and adapt to evolving regulations.

The business benefits of modern data provisioning extend across revenue generation, operations and risk management. It enables you to:

Promote data availability throughout the organization to accelerate speed to market.
Ensure high data utility for data consumers providing actionable insights and innovation.
Accelerate compliance with contextual policies and operationalized best practices.
Protect customers and the privacy of their data with a comprehensive risk management framework.

How Does It Work?

Modern data provisioning streamlines and scales the management of data access, policies, utility, risk and compliance across an organization and beyond. The approach integrates data registration, privacy policy definition, controlled workflows, streamlined approvals and visibility into how data is provisioned and used across an organization, in line with current and evolving standards and regulations.

Enterprise-grade safe data delivery requires a modern data provisioning platform, complete with:

self-service data access
state-of-the-art data privacy capabilities
approval and exception management workflow
integration with existing architecture and processes
support for multiple consumption patterns
hybrid deployment models

Strong privacy protections mitigate risk to enable data sharing. Since risk depends on contextual factors – including who will receive the data, what they will do with it, and where – modern data provisioning solutions must account for the specifics of a situation and the goals of a project. Compliance efforts are also accelerated with regulatory policy templates that automate protections.

Stakeholders can manage data requests and provide rapid access to protected data with automated workflows embedded and streamlined within modern data provisioning processes. Data governance decisions are enforced through repeatable and predictable approval and auditing workflows. A workflow engine automatically routes requests across team members to accelerate collaboration.

Modern data provisioning solutions are built for speed, scale and safety, with an eye to future growth. Open standards and APIs enable seamless integration with external applications. Deployment as a SaaS offering to any environment within minutes promotes rapid onboarding for new, innovative analytics use cases.

How Can You Get Started?

Privitar facilitates modern data provisioning through its comprehensive technology platform and expert advisory services. The Privitar Data Provisioning Platform streamlines and scales the management of data access, policies, utility, risk and compliance across an organization and beyond. The platform integrates data registration, privacy policy definition, controlled workflows, streamlined approvals and visibility into how data is provisioned and used across an organization, in line with global standards and regulations.