Lesson 3.4: Data Governance and Security

Description:
This lesson explains how the ACQF QCP ensures effective data governance and security. It introduces key principles, roles, and technical safeguards that protect data integrity, privacy, and accountability across national and continental levels.

By the end of this Lesson, you will be able to:

• Understand the core principles of data governance and their application within the ACQF QCP, including accountability, transparency, and data quality.
• Identify key roles and responsibilities in the QCP data governance model, such as data owners, virtual space administrators, and curators.
• Explain how the QCP ensures data security and privacy, including encryption, role-based access control, and country-specific data protection mechanisms.

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Data governance refers to the comprehensive framework of practices, standards, processes, roles, and controls that ensure an organisation’s data assets are managed effectively and used appropriately. It is the system of decision rights and accountabilities for an organisation’s data-related processes. For the ACQF QCP, a robust data governance framework is not just a best practice but a fundamental requirement for its success and sustainability.

Key principles underpinning effective data governance include:

• Accountability: clearly defined roles and responsibilities for data management, ensuring that individuals or groups are answerable for the quality, security, and use of data.
• Transparency: data-related processes, policies, and decisions are communicated openly and are understandable to relevant stakeholders.
• Data Quality: ensuring data is accurate, complete, consistent, timely, valid, and fit for its intended purpose. This is a core output of good governance.
• Security: protecting data from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, alteration, or destruction.
• Compliance: adhering to applicable laws, regulations, and contractual obligations related to data handling, privacy, and security.
• Stewardship: assigning responsibility for managing and overseeing specific data assets on behalf of the organization and its stakeholders.

Key Aspects of Data Governance for QCP

Several key aspects of data governance are particularly relevant to the operational context of the ACQF QCP.

Data ownership and stewardship in the QCP ecosystem: In a “federal” system like the QCP, where data originates from multiple national sources, clarity on ownership and stewardship is crucial.

For this reason, the following main roles could be differentiated:

• Data Owner: Within the QCP context, national qualification authorities or any equivalent national bodies are typically considered the Data Owners for the qualification data pertaining under their remit. Given the variation in national systems, it is possible to have multiple data owners within a single country (e.g. segmented across different education and training sectors). Data Owners have the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy, quality, and appropriate use of their data assets
• Virtual space administrator: Depending on the national needs, each country/local/sectoral authority is allocated a dedicated virtual space. This ensures that virtual space administrators and all qualifications curators managed by those virtual space administrators can only access and manage unpublished data linked to the country they are associated with. These administrators will be holding overall responsibility for managing qualification records at local, national and continental levels, such as educational administrators and qualification authorities. They will be able to create/delete/edit accounts for virtual space users as well.
• Qualification curator: Curators are individuals or teams, often within the NQAs (such as designated QCP Curators), who are assigned operational responsibility for managing specific data. Their duties include ensuring data quality, consistency, compliance with data definitions (e.g., ALM fields), and adherence to QCP data submission policies. They are the day-to-day managers of their portion of the qualification data on QCP and are able to import qualifications from a national database in JSON or JSON-LD (via setting up an API or via the bulk upload feature) and to manually enter individual qualifications for their specific country, following the properties/fields of the ACQF Model for Data Exchange.

Data security and privacy in the QCP

Protecting the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of qualification data is paramount for the QCP. This involves a combination of technical, administrative, and potentially physical security measures, alongside robust privacy considerations.

Data privacy, authentication, authorisation

Authentication and authorisation: the platform will manage these critical security aspects internally, without reliance on external services such as Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions. This ensures that control over user access and data security is tightly integrated and tailored to the needs of the ACQF QCP.

Role-based access control: the QCP implements Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model to enforce the principle of least privilege, granting users only the minimum access rights necessary for their roles. Accordingly, the platform users will either be assigned the role of Curator, Virtual Space Administrator or Platform administrator.  This structured approach enhances security by reducing the attack surface if an account is compromised and minimizes risks of accidental or malicious data misuse.

Data accessibility: Access to work-in-progress national qualification data will be restricted to the respective country, ensuring data privacy and sovereignty.

Data anonymity: for publicly accessible QCP analytics and reports, any underlying data with personally identifiable information or sensitive details will undergo rigorous anonymisation to prevent individual re-identification, safeguarding privacy while enabling aggregated insights.

Data security

The QCP employs robust measures to protect data throughout its lifecycle, covering data in transit (over networks) and data at rest (stored within systems). This comprehensive strategy includes strong encryption, controlled jurisdictional data access, careful anonymization for public use, and diligent mechanisms for ongoing data accuracy and integrity.

Transport Layer Security (TLS):  All data in transit between the user interfaces and the servers will be encrypted using TLS (Transport Layer Security). TLS establishes a secure, encrypted tunnel protecting data from eavesdropping, interception, and tampering across networks.  This is crucial for safeguarding all sensitive QCP information, including login credentials and personal data.

Encryption of sensitive data: Sensitive data at rest will be encrypted using strong encryption standards, such as AES-256, to protect against unauthorised access.  This ensures that data remains unintelligible even if storage media is compromised, without access to decryption keys.

Country-specific data access controls: The storage of transactional data will ensure that each country only has access to that country’s data and can’t access the data of other countries. The QCP architecture will incorporate stringent data segregation mechanisms, ensuring transactional data is partitioned with access strictly controlled by national jurisdiction. Authorized users or systems from a specific country will only access their own country’s data, prevented from accessing other countries’ data unless under rare, legally sanctioned, and mutually agreed-upon documented exceptions.

API security: QCP API endpoints will be protected by robust authentication and authorization, e.g. with JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) as a key technology.  JWTs are compact, self-contained JSON objects for securely transmitting information, suited for stateless APIs and delegating user authentication/authorisation.

UI security: User Interface security encompasses measures to protect the client-side of the QCP application (user’s web browser), defending against web attacks targeting users and ensuring the integrity of data submitted through the UI.