Data Governance with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Priyanka Vergadia learn about data governance this week in an interesting chat with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad. While data governance includes security measures, the overarching term also means knowing your data, where it is, and how to use it. In their book, Jessi, Uri, and their co-authors hope to make data governance more accessible by sharing the knowledge Google has developed over twenty plus years.

We talk about the challenges companies of all sizes face implementing data governance frameworks and Uri shares a few tips for streamlining the process. Communication and prioritization are important no matter the size of your team. Companies must also understand the sensitivity of the data, how it’s protected and managed, and why it’s collected.

Having a thoughtful, thorough understanding of what data gives you the most bang for your buck can help companies prioritize certain data collection, make better decisions, scale efficiently, and save money. When communicating with team members, it’s important to share vital information about the data. Knowing who’s in charge of what data, for example, makes accessing that data faster. With proper communication and thorough prioritization, teams can begin to think about how developing automated tools can increase functional data utilization.

Later, we discuss the ways companies can support employees on the data governance journey by clearly communicating the best practice rules. Uri describes how Google uses data governance principles and shares resources Google has published that detail these steps further. Tools like BigQuery and Data Catalog are Google-built products meant to provide companies with more automated data governance solutions.

Jessi and Uri wrap up the show with some more best practices in the data governance sphere, like proper metadata to increase the trustworthiness of data. And Uri details the tools Google Cloud has developed to make your data life easier, giving examples of companies putting these tools into practice.

Jessi Ashdown

Jessi Ashdown is a User Experience Researcher for Google Cloud who conducts user studies with customers from all over the world and uses the findings and feedback from these studies to help inform and shape Google’s data governance products to best serve those users’ needs.

Uri Gilad

Uri is leading the Data Governance efforts, within the Data Analytics area in Google Cloud. As part of his role, Uri is spearheading a cross-functional effort to create the relevant controls, management tools and workflows that enable a GCP customer to apply Data Governance policies in a unified fashion wherever your data may be in your GCP deployment.

Prior to Google, Uri served as an executive in multiple Data Security companies: most recently as the VP of product in MobileIron, a public Zero Trust/Endpoint security platform. Uri was an early employee and a manager in CheckPoint and Forescout - two well known Security brands. Uri holds an M.sc from Tel Aviv University and a B.sc from the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology. You can find him on Linkedin.

Cool things of the week

• Batter up! Anthos on bare metal helps MLB gear up for upcoming season blog
• Introducing Network Connectivity Center: A revolution in simplifying on-prem and cloud networking blog

Interview

• Data Governance: The Definitive Guide: People, Processes, and Tools to Operationalize Data Trustworthiness book
• Goods White Paper doc
• Dremel White Paper doc
• BigQuery site
• Data Catalog site
• Identity and Access Management site
• Strata Data Superstream Series event

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and new GCPSketchnotes.

Stephanie is working on an animated series about data centers.