The Benefits of a Data Audit

A data audit is an in-depth process that helps you find unused data, eliminate data silos, and ensure compliance with data regulations such as GDPR. It requires an exhaustive inventory of all the information in your company including its locations, as well as cloud-based applications. It also covers any sensitive data that your organization stores whether it’s personal information or important business information.

It’s crucial to get all departments involved in this process of discovery so that they understand how their actions may affect the availability of data and its integrity. This is also an excellent opportunity to establish a relationship between departments as they will have to align their data management and auditing practices. They must, for example Recommended Reading agree on how data fields are labeled (e.g. Customer name versus full names, to avoid confusion.

Another benefit of a data audit is that it will find costly and omissions made by employees handling sensitive data. These mistakes are usually the result of inadequate education or a lack of understanding of how to effectively manage information. By implementing an audit trail of your data, you can monitor and identify these errors and encourage your employees to follow the best practices to keep your organization’s data secure.

A data audit will ensure that the information in your organization is accurate constant and free of duplicates. This will enable you to create one view of your customers that you can count on. A data strategy that is efficient and effective will allow you to accelerate your analytics efforts, and improve your business operations.