What it means
Cloud platforms make it easy to copy, transform, analyze, and expose data through many services. Governance must therefore follow the information across storage accounts, databases, analytics platforms, backups, logs, machine-learning services, and third-party integrations.
Why it matters
Without consistent governance, organizations lose confidence in what data exists, who may use it, where it travels, and whether legal or business obligations are being met.
Practical focus
- Maintain data owners, stewards, classification, and lineage
- Apply access controls close to the data and its consumption layer
- Automate discovery of sensitive and unowned data
- Connect retention, residency, privacy, and backup decisions
Common mistakes
- Treating the cloud resource owner as the data owner
- Cataloging data without enforcing decisions
- Allowing uncontrolled copies for analytics
- Ignoring logs, metadata, and derived data
Certification relevance
This subject appears in or supports the following certification bodies of knowledge: