Aga Strandskov, Head of Data Strategy, Digital Isle of Man, on how the Isle of Man’ s Data Asset Foundations framework aims to help businesses govern, value and commercialise data more effectively. usinesses already run on data.

It shapes decision making, powers AI, drives customer insight and underpins competitive advantage across almost every sector of the global economy.

Yet despite its importance, data has remained commercially under-structured, difficult to govern consistently, hard to value and rarely treated as a formal asset.

That contradiction is becoming impossible to ignore.

The Isle of Man is now addressing it through Data Asset Foundations: the first statutory framework purpose-built to enable qualifying data assets to be held, governed and transacted within a clear legal structure.

This represents more than a regulatory development. It is a structural shift in how organisations can govern, share and realise value from data in practice.

The issue facing businesses is no longer whether data matters. The challenge now is how to manage it responsibly while also extracting measurable commercial value from it. Organisations across finance, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing and retail increasingly rely on data as the foundation of daily operations, long-term planning and AI deployment.

At the same time, the growth of AI has accelerated concerns around governance, transparency and trust. Businesses are under pressure from regulators, customers, investors and partners to show how data is collected, controlled and protected. In many cases, existing governance models have struggled to keep pace with the scale and complexity of modern data ecosystems.

Across sectors, businesses sit on vast quantities of high value data. But without clear legal recognition, much of that value has remained locked away.

This is the data asset paradox and it manifests in three key ways.

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