Data access challenges thwarting European CEOs’ aims to become data-driven intelligent organisations

Becoming a data-driven "intelligent organisation" is one of the highest priorities for European C-Suite executives with 87% of CXOs aiming to achieve this goal in the next three to four years, according to an IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Immuta, a leader in data access and data security. 

However, data access issues remain the most frequent and tangible bottleneck to achieving their target - with two-thirds of European organisations having issues leveraging their data because they lack the right kind of data access governance. 

90% of the 500 European organisations surveyed consider it crucial to have a digital-first strategy to achieve business value from more of their data.

Yet while the ambition for organisations to utilise their data is high, with European CEOs aiming for 40% of revenue to be generated from digital by 2025, the report also illustrates that many are finding the journey challenging.

The lack of a modern, continuously governed and well-audited data access strategy across the business is an issue for 61% of organisations, with 14% citing it as a “critical challenge.” In some instances, as much as 60% of a data life cycle is spent waiting for data access.

“Cloud migration, especially when companies have adopted multiple cloud data platforms, has created significant problems for businesses, in particular the ‘time to data delay’ where organisations struggle to efficiently manage data access demands whilst balancing privacy and security requirements,” explains Immuta’s EMEA General Manager, Colin Mitchell.

“This data access bottleneck gets in the way of the business being able to use data to make intelligent, data-led decisions. With barriers to data access, it is important to make the C-suite aware of the problem that affects all professionals and processes across an organisation and how to address it in a way that’s both efficient and future-proof.”

Mitchell added, “Organisations need to automate data access at scale and the technology to do that is attribute-based access control, or ABAC. The move from legacy role-based access control (RBAC) to ABAC simplifies data access control and provides dynamic policy enforcement. It enables organisations to move from a default ‘no’ to a default ‘yes,’ enabling more teams to gain value from their data.”

In addition to compliance issues, the report highlighted several key reasons why business outcomes are not being met and why challenges are increasing with the paradigm shift in data creation, use, and regulations. These include:

Continuous data growth and fragmentation

Security and data loss risks

Spiralling data management costs