Data Governance Issues in Lake House Migrations

  • February 11, 2025

1. Data Governance Issues in Lake House Migrations

Lakehouse migration is a must-step for data modernization of organizations. It moves their data architecture towards the resilient architects of data lakes and the structure of data warehouses. But, as organizations shift to a lake house environment, keeping
with effective data governance becomes more difficult.

A recent report highlights that enterprises allocate between 20-40% of their IT budgets to address data governance challenges, underscoring the critical importance of
robust governance frameworks in such migrations.

Data governance in lake house migrations is a critical function for businesses in Illinois. It provides for data integrity, can ensure compliance, and helps with efficient
data management in the new system. In this blog, we will discuss common data governance issues involved in lakehouse migration and ways to tackle those issues.

2. Understanding Data Governance in the Context of Lake Houses

Let’s begin first by having a sense of what data governance in lake house migrations signifies for Illinois businesses.

Data governance defines all methods and standards which administer data resources
appropriately while ensuring productivity. Maintaining data security and quality along with privacy protection for compliance takes place through this position to ensure proper data access for the appropriate users at specific times.

Lake house governance requires additional complexities compared to traditional data management systems. A data lake and data warehouse integration turns raw data
storage capabilities of a data lake into structured analytics assets through data warehouse functionality.

So, this hybrid model implies that effective data governance is crucial for organizing huge amounts of raw and structured data.

2.1 Key Principles of Data Governance

There are several key principles of data governance that organizations must follow to ensure the reliability and compliance of their data:

2.1.1. Data Quality

Clarifying data quality from accurate, complete, and consistent.

2.1.2. Data Security

Protection of sensitive information Protection to the data from unauthorized access.

2.1.3. Data Privacy

Keeping data secure by following laws and regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA.

2.1.4. Data Compliance

Protecting data privacy and restricting it to customers only.

2.1.5. Data Lineage

Traceability of data from its source until its destination helps explain what happened to it and how it was used.

2.2 Why Governance is Critical During Migrations

During a lake house migration, effective governance is what ensures seamless transition, data integrity protection, ensuring compliance during migrations in Illinois
with regulations, and avoiding the data sprawl and security risks for operations and sensitive information.

2.2.1. Maintaining Data Integrity

A Lake House is the repository for your business, making it important to the integrity of your data that it’s not corrupted, lost, or changed the moment data migrates from
legacy. Data integrity issues are the risk without proper governance.

2.2.2. Ensuring compliance

Migrations are not always compliant because if the governance framework is not appropriately followed, they can lead to non-compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or any other regional law.

2.2.3. Avoiding Data Sprawl

A significant risk—especially if overlooked—is the emergence of data silos or sprawl, leading to a lack of visibility and governance over valuable information dispersed across the new system.

2.2.4. Risk Management

Effective governance reduces or mitigates the risk of breaches, leaks, or unauthorized access to sensitive data.

In the absence of adequate governance processes, migrations can also suffer from considerable barriers that arise for both the organization’s operations and its compliance with legal and other regulatory standards.

3. Common Governance Issues in Lake House Migrations

While there are many benefits of moving to a lake house, we are aware of several common Lake house governance challenges that occur when organizations migrate.

3.1 Lack of Unified Metadata Standards

In a lake house environment, managing and organizing data is critical, and metadata should be to order your data along with it. However, during the migration phase, the
organizations often suffer from a lack of unified metadata standards. This information that describes the structure, origin, and use of data is known as metadata, and it is also important for data governance.

Metadata is not consistent, when it’s pulled into the lake house from various sources. If the metadata is not clear and standardized, it becomes difficult to understand the
context of the data, how data has been transformed or how it needs to be accessed.

Challenge: Inconsistent metadata can result in confusion, poor data quality, and incomplete traceability to data lineage, which makes it hard to maintain data governance standards.

Solution: Establishing a clear and consistent metadata management framework before migration is key. This includes defining metadata standards and ensuring they are
adhered to across all data sources. Tools that automate metadata management and track lineage can also help ensure that metadata is properly maintained throughout the migration process.

3.2 Ensuring Compliance with Regional Laws (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA)

One of the most important aspects of data governance is compliance with regional laws. Sensitive data being in transit across borders during a migration can trigger new legal obligations.

For example the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States place stringent requirements on how personal and sensitive data can be handled.

Challenge: Data may enter a state of noncompliance with regional privacy and security laws during lake house migrations: the challenge. Executive responsibility under GDPR demands special data handling requirements which involve protecting
and encrypting user data in addition to maintaining access and deletion rights.

Solution: Organizations must establish complete documentation of legal and regulatory requirements beforehand they start with the migration process to obtain
compliance. The process demands both data transmission destinations and data encryption standards for transfer stages as well as complete insight into how data gets
used. Many compliance tools enable automated handling of data compliance standards through data masking systems and encryption protocols and access management features.

4. Solutions to Address Governance Challenges

Security difficulties which arise during lake house transfers can be overcome by adopting specific solutions which both reduce these risks and facilitate the successful implementation of the migration process.

4.1 Implementing Data Lineage and Audit Trails

Data lineage and audit trails are one of effective ways of being able to manage governance during the migration. Data lineage lets companies track the origin to the
destination of data. This is important because data gets transformed, where it gets stored, and how accessible the data is.

Solution: Having a data lineage tool or platform can help you have full visibility on
how data is moved around the lake house environment. Audit trails can help track every action taken on the data, ensuring that all modifications or access points are
logged and can be reviewed if needed. This also helps with compliance audits and ensures that sensitive data is being handled properly.

4.2 Centralizing Access Control and Permissions

To ensure data governance in a lake house, it is essential to have effective access control and permission management. If there is no proper access control granted to sensitive data, it can be accessed or corrupted by unauthorized users, which may result
in compliance or data security breaches.

Challenge: Being a lake house system, where several data sources and users are involved, makes the access control management complex. Ensuring data permissions are properly enforced across the board, however, can often be difficult to define who is supposed to have access to what data and it can become more frustrating when permissions aren’t followed consistently.

Solution: Centralize IAM to control access and permissions. It facilitates organizations to define and enforce data access policies depending on roles and
prevent unauthorized personnel from accessing sensitive or confidential data. Regular audits of access permissions can also assist in identifying and reducing the risks of unauthorized access.

5. Conclusion

Data governance is essential to any lake house migration. Organizations that want a migration to run smoothly and understand the common challenges but do not know the key principles of data governance, will have an easier time of it. However, there
are a lot of benefits in the migration to a lake house, as long as governance measures are being implemented enough. Addressing metadata problems, ensuring compliance,
and building data lineage and access control will provide the foundation for long-term success in the organization’s new data environment.

Visvero specializes in data governance solutions, helping organizations in Illinois streamline lake house migrations while ensuring security and compliance. Our expert
team provides tailored strategies for metadata management, access control, and regulatory compliance.

Partner with Visvero to safeguard your data assets and optimize governance in your lake house transition.

6. FAQs

6.1 What is the role of metadata in lake house governance?

Metadata is necessary for the governing of lake houses as it carries information on the structure of the data, its source, as well as the lineage. Metadata management, however, can be properly managed, helps prevent data quality, traceability, and compliance issues, and helps accelerate data organization, search, and management.

6.2 How do you maintain compliance during migrations?

Organizations who want to remain compliant in the midst of migrations have to also understand what legal and regulatory rules apply to the data being migrated. This includes implementing encryption, data masking, access control, and ensuring that data is transferred in compliance with privacy laws such as GDPR or HIPAA.

6.3 What are the best practices for securing sensitive data?

Best practices for securing sensitive data include encrypting data both in transit and at rest, implementing strong access controls, auditing data access regularly, and ensuring compliance with relevant privacy regulations. Additionally, using data masking or tokenization can help secure sensitive information during migrations.

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