So far, all of these things are building up to building data management roles. Now, these roles reflect a certain kind of responsibility over the data to make sure that throughout its life cycle, it's being protected by the proper party in the proper way, and that only authorized activities and persons are going to be involved. First, we need to think about what we mean by data ownership.

Now, this is frequently defined as data owned by an enterprise or in the case of individually identifiable information, such as PHI, that we find in healthcare, and PII, which we find many other places that represents the person. In the enterprise, the data owner role is assigned to officers to enact policy in force and ensure that security measures are enforced. And these roles are these. The data controller, an entity, usually an officer within the company that determines the purposes and means of the processing.

We have the data processor, a third party entity that processes personal data on behalf of the controller. It can also be a function that the data controller itself performs. There is of course the data subject, any of us, the identifiable person described by the data.

Another role is the data custodian and this role typically supports and enforces the data controller's policy. It is oftentimes assigned to someone in the workforce working for the data controller representative.