Information Governance: The Key to Managing Data in 2025

Introducing an effective information governance strategy is becoming increasingly important within the data centre industry. In a world driven by data and its increasing volume, information remains a business-critical asset that offers both opportunities and challenges.

Regulation is becoming more the norm across the wider technology world. On 1 August 2024, the EU AI Act came into operation, which introduced a comprehensive framework for enterprise AI use. It means datasets may be subject to data governance and management practices.

“Organisations of all shapes and sizes are seeing the value of investing in good information governance practices to manage their data across multiple formats, networks, systems, software, and hardware,” explains Hana Laws, Principal Consultant and Regional Lead, Information Governance Professional Services at Iron Mountain. 

“With more data, comes an ever-evolving privacy and regulatory landscape.”

The challenge with managing data

Data centre compliance is the process of ensuring that data centres adhere to regulatory requirements and industry best practices to protect data security and privacy. Identifying and mitigating risks helps strengthen the security posture, which then helps to promote transparency and accountability. 

“It signals to organisations that they must learn to navigate an increasingly complex regulatory environment while managing their continuously expanding data,” Hana says. “This is particularly important as the quality and categorisation of internal data remains one of the top concerns for implementing AI in organisations.”
In order to effectively manage their data and unlock the true potential of data, Hana suggests that information governance is a critical strategy for an organisation to manage its information.

“Developing and implementing a robust information governance strategy requires an organisation to understand its organisational goals, its legal and regulatory obligations and its risk appetite,” Hana says. 

“With this understanding, an organisation can undertake a four-step process to implement a strategy across multiple domains and specialisms.”

Implementing a robust information governance strategy

In order to have tight control of the information governance process, an organisation must assess and benchmark its existing practices, policies and operational models to understand where potential gaps may exist.

“Businesses need to gauge employee awareness of information governance to identify any necessary training requirements,” she explains. “The next step is then to outline the information governance strategy’s goals, which could include responding to audits, mitigating risks, ensuring compliance, improving efficiency or reducing costs.”

She continues: “Following this, an organisation needs to justify a business case for implementing the strategy and secure funding to establish a formal change programme. At this stage, the organisation must identify the specific changes needed to execute the roadmap effectively.”

With new measures in place, the next step is to look at the remediation of legacy data and information. According to Hana, as AI adoption accelerates, prioritising legacy data remediation becomes essential to ensure data quality, integrity and security, which are critical to the successful implementation of AI systems. 

“However, reviewing all legacy data and technology is a time-intensive process that cannot be accomplished manually,” she adds. “To address this challenge, organisations should look for technological solutions that can identify, remediate, and automatically classify digital content to effectively remove redundant, outdated or trivial data.

“Developing and implementing a comprehensive information governance strategy is crucial for organisations to effectively manage their information assets, mitigate risks and ensure compliance.”

Hana also explains: “Having an information governance framework in place helps to uncover and address data risks, such as breaches and privacy non-compliance while ensuring that an organisation is complying with regulatory requirements. 

“Organisations can balance compliance with business priorities and extract the full value of their data, whilst ensuring that their data is future-proofed to withstand the new era of technology.”

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