SaaS – Multi-cloud Data Stewardship

As many organizations move to the cloud the question of data governance and stewardship must be addressed.  Is the organization comfortable with data assets being distributed over SaaS services and cloud platforms?  Or is does an organization want data available and managed in a central location, governed by the organization?

Data is an organizations critical asset after the organization’s customers and people.  Managing and governing that data is beyond necessary.  There are many threats to data, both internal and external.   Corporate espionage and ransomware are real threats to an organizations data asset. As we are all transitioning and transforming to digital services stewarding our data is more important than ever.   

Many SaaS platforms or cloud-based solutions make it difficult to repatriate your data when an organization decides to change services or solutions.  If your SaaS provider or cloud provider is charging for access or egress of your data, find another solution.

Data must be portable and available to support an organizations transactional processing need.  An ideal model is a transactional approach where data is written both to the SaaS solution or cloud solution and an organization control data landing zone. 

At a minimum replicating data schema from SaaS or Cloud services ensures that an organizations data is always available to the organization.  There are many ways to accomplish this my bias is to API transactional integration to a cloud hosted data structure, data mesh or data lake.  

Once data is portable and available then options for the usage of the data become enabling and strategic.