6 Ways To Avoid Data Debt

6 Ways To Avoid Data Debt

6 Ways To Avoid Data Debt

To prevent technological debt, DevOps teams develop their infrastructure as code, streamline deployments employing continuous integration and continuous delivery, and set up continuous testing.

Technical debt that is too high bogs down agile development groups that are trying to deliver features and increase application stability. Although data scientists should assess their ML models and some other analytics code, data engineering teams wanting to enhance data operations and data governance must decrease technical debt in their automation tools and codes.

Data and analytics teams must do more than just reduce technical debt at the code level. Moreover, they must solve data debt by

  • Data quality improvement
  • Data duplication reduction
  • Organizing master data and addressing data security concerns
  • Finding Sources of dark data

In this blog, let’s find ways to reduce data debt.

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Data Debt – An Overview:

Companies are being urged by the data-driven change to invest more in recruiting data scientists, data engineers, and analysts. After being hired, the data team works quickly to ensure that the business team is utilizing the correct data when making decisions.

Data debt is produced by this strain and speed. Teams struggle to address their mounting data debt without the appropriate governance and big data analytics solutions. Some studies discovered that the majority of teams today defer this procedure because they believe the effort done to record and manage data is never finished and is constantly out-of-date, not because they don’t want to.

The issue with delaying data governance is that it leads to inefficiencies that grow over time, making it more challenging to address later. The lack of adequate data governance makes it difficult and expensive for companies to onboard new data analysts.

Organizations lose sleep at the overwhelming prospect of cleansing the data and reducing its sprawl. We refer to this as “data debt.” It occurs when you have inaccurate, inconsistent, unutilized, and undocumented data.

Data debt is similar to technical debt in that it is easier to spot once it has been created. Before implementing new analytics capabilities or refactoring the data pipeline, teams frequently need to address debt-related problems. It is more difficult to put best practices into practice that reduce new data debt when teams are unable to anticipate all dashboarding, potential analytics, and machine learning use cases.

The following six actions can help data teams prevent or decrease the dangers associated with data debt.

Integrate Analytical Capabilities With Governance:

DevOps teams strive to shift left on security and QA techniques because they are aware that it is far more difficult to fix code flaws and address quality and security concerns after the code has been produced.

Similarly, while developing or upgrading data pipelines, analytics, and ML models,  data scientists, and data operations engineers must shift to data governance techniques and institute them.

 

Data debt affects teams far more quickly than most teams realize. Data teams run the danger of wasting time maintaining reports no one uses and creating data that no one knows when they embrace a self-service model of delivering insights to corporate customers and their data debt is not resolved.

Construct A Data Management Strategy:

To avoid and lowering data debt, it is essential to have a thorough data management plan. The goals, policies, and processes for handling your data should be described in a data management plan. Your data will be better organized and easier to access as a result.

The following elements have to be part of a sound data management strategy:

  • Create guidelines, procedures, and standards for the management of data at all stages of its lifespan. This covers data privacy, security, and compliance, as well as data quality.
  • Integrating data from numerous sources will provide you with a complete picture of the data in your firm.
  • Build a data architecture that meets your company’s demands while allowing for flexibility and scalability.
  • Establish procedures and instruments to guarantee accurate, comprehensive, and consistent data.

Implement Data Governance:

The practice of controlling the accessibility, usefulness, consistency, and security of data used in organizations is known as data governance. This covers guidelines, procedures, and standards for the life-cycle management of data.

These aspects should be covered by data governance:

  • Create rules and processes that guarantee data quality, including data profiling, data cleaning, and data validation.
  • Establish safeguards to guard against unauthorized access, theft, and corruption of your data.
  • Adopting policies and processes for data privacy will help your firm abide by data privacy laws.

Invest In Technologies For Data Quality:

To prevent and minimize data debt, it is crucial to invest in data quality solutions. You may find and fix data mistakes, duplications, and inconsistencies with the use of data quality tools. Your data will be more accurate as a result, and maintaining it will take less time and effort.

Instances of data quality tools include:

  • Data profiling tools to examine your data for trends, discrepancies, and mistakes.
  • Data cleansing tools to locate and eliminate duplicate or inaccurate data.
  • Data validation tools verify the accuracy and completeness of data by comparing it to a set of predetermined rules.

Put Data Security Measures Into Practice:

To avoid and lowering data debt, it is essential to implement data security measures. Identifying and stopping security breaches involves deploying monitoring tools, access limits, and encryption.

Consider the following while putting data security measures into place:

  • Protect sensitive data by using encryption.
  • By limiting access to data according to individual roles and permissions, access controls are used.
  • Use monitoring software to look for and stop security lapses.

Clear Up Your Data Frequently:

A crucial first step in preventing and minimizing data debt is routine data cleanup. If you want to tidy up your data, think about:

  • Finding out-of-date or irrelevant data: Evaluate your data to find out what information is no longer helpful or relevant.
  • Resolve duplicates: It will be done by using tools for data quality to find and remove them.

Wrapping Up:

The actual secret to avoiding tech debt is to become adept at striking a balance between your immediate requirements and your long-term objectives. Big Data analytics services can also help in avoiding this.

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