Data Sharing

What is Data Sharing?

Data sharing refers to the ability to make the same data available to one or many stakeholders. It enables new business opportunities, collaboration with partners, and the generation of new revenue streams through data monetization. In today's data-driven world, effective data sharing is crucial for the evolution of business models and staying competitive.

Different Types of Data Sharing Methods

There are various types of data sharing, including sharing within an organization and sharing outside of an organization, one-on-one sharing, sharing with multiple recipients, public sharing, and private sharing. Companies may use public or private data marketplaces to enhance their data sharing and collaboration. Privacy-safe data clean rooms can be used for handling sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII).

Challenges Faced in Data Sharing

Despite its importance, data sharing can be challenging. One of the most critical challenges is security. Sharing only the right data with the right people within the right context requires strategic policies, effective tools, and intentional processes that are consistently followed. Data governance, ensuring that data is used in compliance with specific regulations, is another challenge. In addition, technical and structural data management issues, such as managing multiple systems and legacy or proprietary solutions, can hinder efficient and effective data sharing.

Potential Benefits of Effective Data Sharing

Gartner predicts that by 2024, organizations that promote data sharing will outperform their peers on most business value metrics. Data sharing eliminates data silos, resulting in greater efficiency and transparency, increased collaboration within an organization, and with partners. Data sharing also provides organizations with new and faster time to insights that help improve performance. Finally, data sharing creates possibilities for revenue streams by enabling an organization to offer new data products or services.

Data Sharing Technologies: Legacy and Modern Solutions

Legacy technologies such as SFTP (secure file transfer protocol), email, or APIs (application programming interface) allow the implementation of vendor-agnostic homegrown solutions that work both on-premises and on clouds. However, they are often costly to manage and maintain and are increasingly difficult to secure and govern as modern data requirements have evolved. Cloud object storage is a suitable option for the cloud because its scalability supports unlimited data growth. It's widely available, inexpensive, and reliable, but there are downsides. For example, recipients must be on the same cloud to access the data, and security and governance processes can be complicated.