Promoting data governance through data contracts
Data contracts are the perfect place to promote data governance. In this section, we’ll explore how you can use data contracts to improve the visibility of data governance, collect up-to-date categorization of data, and provide the tooling and guardrails the data generators need to handle their data effectively.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, Introducing Data Contracts, the contract definition can be extended to capture any metadata we need to ensure we’re handling our data in accordance with our standards. This could include the following:
- Whether it is personal data.
- What entity the data relates to (for example, is it about a customer, an order, or another entity?).
- Who has access to the data, and when that access expires.
- How the data is classified according to your organization’s policies (for example, is it confidential, secret, or public knowledge?).
- How long we keep this data for (the...