Sadly, treating "data" as a singular noun leaves the door open for a grammatical horror: datae.

This arises from treating the neuter plural as a feminine singular, with the following reasoning:
  1. data is singular.
  2. I want to talk about more than one of it.
  3. I know it's a Latin word.
  4. Latin words that end in "a" are made plural by changing the "a" to "ae"
  5. The plural of data is therefore datae

I have seen this in formal writing. I have wept.