Data Access

Good data quality management is expensive. Poor data quality management is “expensiver”.

“Every business is a software business” proclaimed more than 20 years ago Watts S. Humphrey, the “Father of Software Quality”. A cursory look at organizations today — whether big or small — is enough to ascertain his premonitions. In the 2020s we could even go one step further and say that “Every business is a data business.”

Welcome to the third part of our article series on data access. In the first two we focused on why sometimes these data access initiatives can fail and what you can do about it , as well as how to set up your system to handle employee access to sensitive data

This is the second article in our series on data access best practices. In the first one we looked at the reasons why data access can be challenging for organizations and highlighted some of the key principles that are good to have in mind when setting up this process. In this one we will show you how to protect your sensitive data.

We discuss why data access is a surprisingly difficult problem to solve for large organizations. Neglecting this problem poses underappreciated yet existential risks to a company's ML strategy. We propose a few principles that can help enable data access in a way that both enables innovation and manages risk effectively.