Governance and Compliance
Define ownership, policy, and accountability for lawful EO operations.
What Governance Covers
Governance sets ownership, approval rights, policy controls, lifecycle rules, and compliance reporting for EO data and services.
Why Governance Matters
Without clear governance, policy is inconsistent, supplier obligations are missed, and legal or contractual risk rises quickly.
What Good Looks Like
A mature platform has clear data owners and stewards, codified policy enforcement in workflows, complete provenance, and auditable compliance reporting.
Minimum Requirements
- Defined ownership and change authority for each product and interface.
- Retention, archival, deletion, and legal hold controls.
- License enforcement and usage restriction controls in code.
- Provenance and auditability across ingestion, processing, and delivery.
- Regulatory and contractual alignment with reporting cadence.
Ownership and Stewardship
Data Ownership
Assign accountable owners per dataset and derivative product.
Stewardship Roles
Define operational stewards for quality, lineage, and policy adherence.
Approval Rights
Document who can approve publication, sharing, and exception cases.
Change Authority
Tie schema/process changes to named authorities and review boards.
Access Governance
Map entitlements to user roles, missions, and contractual terms.
License and Usage Controls
Entitlements
Enforce license-linked access entitlements at API and delivery layers.
Redistribution Rules
Restrict onward sharing based on supplier and customer terms.
Geographic Restrictions
Apply region-based restrictions, including export control constraints.
Temporal Restrictions
Enforce availability windows and embargo periods.
Derivative Product Rules
Track derivative rights handling by supplier contract.
Data Lifecycle Management
Retention
Define retention schedules by data class and obligation profile.
Archival
Align archival policy with cost, performance, and legal requirements.
Deletion
Automate deletion and certify completion with audit evidence.
Legal Hold
Support hold overrides that suspend normal lifecycle actions.
Backup Retention Alignment
Ensure backup policy does not violate deletion obligations.
Compliance and Regulatory Alignment
Address residency controls, export regulations, and jurisdiction-specific rules in operating policy.
Auditing, Provenance, and Accountability
Capture lineage and decision provenance so every output can be traced to source, policy, and approver.
Governance Decisions
Choose centralized vs federated governance models, policy-as-code tooling, and exception-management thresholds.
Metrics and Health Signals
- Policy violation rate and remediation time.
- Lineage/provenance completeness.
- License compliance exceptions.
- Retention/deletion execution success.
- Regulatory reporting timeliness.
Anti-Patterns
- Policy documents not implemented in platform controls.
- Unowned datasets and unclear approval chains.
- Ignoring supplier-specific contract obligations.
- Manual compliance evidence collection during audits.
Implementation Checklist
- Is ownership clear?
- Are minimum controls defined?
- Are failure modes addressed?
- Are measurable health signals defined?
- Are anti-patterns named?
- Are dependencies on other domains explicit?
- Is there at least one EO-specific implementation example?
- Is there a practical implementation checklist?
Example EO Patterns
- Supplier contract tags drive automated redistribution controls in delivery APIs.
- Residency-constrained datasets remain in sovereign region with policy-enforced routing.
- Derived product publication blocked until provenance and license checks pass.