What is a cloud data council?
A cloud data council is a team typically made up of corporate and cloud provider representatives. The cloud data council’s purpose is to advance the organization’s adoption and efficient usage of cloud data and services. The cloud data council delves into the ways business data flows through the organization. This information helps the IT department understand where business data originates, including data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and mobile app data.
Cloud data council corporate stakeholder members are commonly from the IT/data engineering, financial services, compliance, and legal departments. Corporate council members often represent business and technology units within an organization and may also include data professionals.
Cloud data councils are intended to be an innovation driver rather than bureaucratic block. They can help an organization find the right data management model for big data analytics machine learning initiatives, for example. Cloud data councils can also help organizations lessen risk and define appropriate data access policies.
A cloud data council’s focus is on optimizing cloud data and services in a way that also minimizes risk to the organization:
- Reduce IT budgets. Cloud data councils can help reduce excess or duplicated spending across individual business units by offering more efficient options that meet security, compliance, and software governance requirements. Partnering with internal departments, such as procurement, can help give insight into the best utilization of cloud resources and budget.
- Build the right infrastructure. Cloud data councils can determine what technologies work best based on business needs.
- Create a common and transparent data model. Cloud data councils can help standardize a common data management model across all systems, on-premise and multiple cloud platforms.
- Meet data security and compliance requirements. A cloud data council can help organizations ensure all cloud data meets industry security and compliance requirements no matter where it resides.