Data Governance Conundrum Why Data Virtualization Is Becoming Essential

Sitting at the intersection between IT and business, the chief data officer (CDO) is responsible for enterprisewide data governance and the utilization of information as a critical asset. First and foremost, the CDO is charged with the business mission of leveraging data assets to enable strategic business initiatives, such as driving a digital transformation, enhancing customer relationships, and/or leveraging data to get ahead of the competition.Data has always been a valuable asset, but today’s CDO knows that the value of data grows exponentially when all data within the enterprise can be readily leveraged for making holistic decisions. However, this is no easy task, as it involves integrating data from both modern and legacy sources, structured and unstructured data, and data-at-rest and data-in-motion. Organizations have successfully moved data from disparate sources into a single central repository like a data lake, yet the data is still not integrated for enterprisewide data governance or queries that span the entire set. Perhaps the most impactful way to integrate data may be through a contemporary technology called data virtualization (DV).