The Banking Executive, Issue 155, November 2021

Who Will Govern Global Data? connections or devices allow this data to be transferred from one com- puter to another. There is also a dis- tinction that needs to be drawn between “data” (machine-readable ones and zeros, or “code”) and “in- formation” (what that data means to humans). Data governance. Data governance is the rules, stan- dards, policies, and laws set by vari- ous authorities for managing data including access and use. The term “data governance” has many differ- ent meanings depending on the con- text and the perspective of various stakeholders. Data governance key areas include: • national security and law enforce- ment: ensuring access to data for purposes of domestic and interna- tional security; avoiding misuse of that data; and protecting data against illicit collection. • economic growth and innovation: This involves creating and access- ing large databases of data for re- search and development of data-intensive technologies like machine learning/artificial intelli- gence, as well as for cross-border transactions and ecommerce. • policies and practices for data flow: cross border data flow is a major concern raising security and data protection issues. Global Data Governance. Global data governance is the rules, standards, policies, and laws govern- ing how data is collected, used, stored, and transferred across bor- ders. Trust is a major concern to en- sure “Data Free Flow with Trust”. Global data governance involves how governments support data flows across borders or restrict data flows. It also involves the ability of firms to transfer data from domestic sources to foreign countries {the opposite of free data flow). Some countries re- quire that a copy of data be stored on a server within that country before it is allowed to be sent out. Restrictions exist on certain domain and sectors like health or finance. For instance, China requires firms to store certain kinds of data on servers inside the country, while allowing transfer in or out under certain conditions. Russia and India impose local storage and local processing of data while pro- hibiting outbound transfer altogether especially for payment data. Cross border data flow is a major area of global data governance involving governance of relationships at super- national, national, and sub-national levels. Data infrastructure. A data infrastructure is a digital infra- structure promoting data sharing and consumption. Similar to other infra- structures, it is a structure needed for the operation of a society as well as the services and facilities necessary for the data economy. Research Infra- structures are layered hardware and software systems which support shar- ing of a wide spectrum of resources, spanning from networks, storage, computing resources, and system- level middleware software, to struc- tured information within collections, archives, and databases. Global data infrastructures. Data drives global businesses, economies, and countries. Global data infrastructure consolidates world data and provide global access to all countries. Global data infra- structure may have various purposes. For instance, global data infrastruc- tures for research are based on prin- ciples of global collaboration and shared resources to encompass the sharing needs of all research activi- ISSUE 155 NOVEMBER 2021 the BANKING EXECUTIVE 9