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What is Data Portability (Data Porting)? Why is data portability important? How is data portability implemented? What are the best practices for maintaining data portability? How does AWS support your data portability requirements?

What is Data Portability (Data Porting)?

Data portability is the ability to move data between two systems at will. Modern enterprises have varying data storage and access requirements depending on use case, geographical location, regulations, and customer expectations. Data portability enables them to transfer data as needed between cloud service providers and on-premises systems, allowing them to best meet requirements.

Why is data portability important?

Legacy systems enforced proprietary data formats and licensing obligations on customers, locking them into specific systems. Complex technical challenges around moving data, escalated costs, and imposed vendor lock-ins. Without data portability, an organization's data is accessible only through the platform where it is stored. Such a siloed approach can result in inaccessible data and data quality issues.

The benefits of data portability include:

Supports data accessibility for analytics

Data portability eliminates data silos, enabling data to flow seamlessly from multiple systems into a single central repository. By creating a single source of truth, business analysts have a more accessible system from which to draw their information. Additionally, analysts can use a diverse set of tools for BI, ML, and AI on this centralized data pool, leveraging it to provide real-time insights and decision-making capabilities to other departments.

Supports regulatory compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act and GDPR

Article 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states that every individual has the right to data portability. Additionally, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) requires organizations to implement systems that allow them to port data between different locations, removing unnecessary data silos and promoting data democratization.

These data protection laws ensure that data controllers implement data portability, giving data subjects and all parties involved control over their information.

Enhances data quality management

Data portability involves creating a system in which all data can freely move through your business, ultimately arriving at your single source of truth. By collating data in this manner, organizations can implement data quality management checks to screen for data validation, deduplication, and metadata tagging. These practices will remove any duplicate, invalid, or obsolete data to ensure that only high-quality, complete data is delivered to your centralized data storage system.

How is data portability implemented?

Businesses employ several strategies to implement data portability.

Open data formats

There are several non-proprietary data formats that facilitate data portability, such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Parquet, and Comma Separated Values (CSV). Each of these formats is widely supported by data warehouses and business intelligence platforms, making data portability easy to integrate and beneficial in allowing analysts to interact with datasets. Always provide personal data and transmit personal data in response to data portability requests in these open data formats.

Customer choice

Businesses can implement data portability into their systems by utilizing frameworks that provide customers with full control over their data. Here are a few fundamental frameworks that businesses should follow:

  • Customers own their own data, including all information from IoT devices, location data, data from wearable devices, and data generated from interacting with a business.
  • Customers have the ability to store content in the format of their choice.
  • Customers choose the geographical locations in which to store their data, which doesn’t change unless the customer requests to transmit personal data elsewhere.
  • Customers can download or delete their data at any time.

Giving customers full control over their data ensures that they can switch providers and relocate their data without any hassle.

Interoperability

Using interoperable formats, where data can readily move between disparate systems and networks without the need for modification, enhances data portability. Interoperable systems should utilize standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) and connections to facilitate seamless data movement.

Additionally, implementing standard data transfer protocols, such as Server Message Block (SMB), Network File System (NFS), HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), all promote the seamless movement of data.

What are the best practices for maintaining data portability?

There are numerous strategies that businesses can use to maintain data portability and ensure data portability requests are fulfilled.

Understand your data

Developing an extensive understanding of what data types and formats your business uses, where data is sourced from and stored, and how it is handled in your business promotes the use of the right transfer systems. With full visibility over all the data in your system, you’ll be better equipped to implement data portability, and its coverage remains comprehensive.

Implement automation

By automating the methods of data transfer your business uses, it forces developers to adopt standardized data formats and protocols, facilitating these automatic processes across different systems. An automated system means:

  • A reduction in the effort of data portability
  • An enhancement of data consistency
  • Improved data migration across your systems
  • Improved data transfer systems.

Centralize data governance

Data governance frameworks determine how your organization manages and uses the data it stores. By centralizing data governance and establishing company-wide systems that you can rely on, you can standardize data policy around retention, deletion, auditing, and access management. Effective data governance leads to effective data portability, ensuring that your data remains traceable, mobile, and compliant.

Ensure data quality management

Investigate any data quality issues to find their root cause. There may be an error in your data validation or transformation processes that then causes larger issues in your data management system. By resolving these data quality management issues, you can maintain data integrity and ensure that your entire data system remains mobile without issue.

How does AWS support your data portability requirements?

Offering customer choice and freedom is a core principle throughout AWS. Our customers always retain ownership and control of their data, including where it is stored, how it is stored, and who has access. AWS offers a wide range of database types, each suitable for different types of data. There is no contractual obligation for customers to remain with a single type of database. You can:

  • Run databases from other vendors on AWS
  • Change the type of instance your databases run on at any time
  • Export your data out of AWS

Everything AWS does gives customers the freedom to choose the best-fit cloud services and features available.

AWS provides many tools and documented techniques to support both data migration into and out of AWS. Our services are built on numerous open standards like SQL, Linux, and Xen. For example, you can use:

The Amazon Data Portability APIs allow users to access and export their personal data from Amazon services in a machine-readable format. They enable developers to create tools that facilitate the secure retrieval and transfer of user data, supporting transparency, user control, and compliance with data privacy regulations.

Get started with data portability on AWS by creating a free account today.