Information and data governance is one of the hottest and most debated topics any organization can discuss in today’s world. Every organization, big or small, knows that it has to protect its own data, but with regulations now being enforced through CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA, etc. the playing field has changed drastically. No business can afford to look the other way any longer. You know your business must adhere to these regulations and clean up its data to avoid unnecessary risk and legal action, but how?!?
Unstructured data, as you might guess, is any type of data that can’t be easily organized into your typical database or spreadsheet. These are the pieces of content that you come across every day. They exist in emails and social media. You might run across this information in webinars or conference calls. Your call centers get unstructured data in the form of verbal communications.
Cloud computing is one of the top three game-changing technologies, meaning many organizations regardless of size, industry, and technology will begin or increase their usage of the cloud. With that being said, according to Gartner’s most recent report, “through 2024, 80% of companies unaware of mistakes made by organizations in their cloud adoption will overspend in cloud by 20% to 50%.”
While much of the corporate workforce can easily work from home as we weather the COVID-19 pandemic, IT teams struggle to maintain the health of both physical technical environments and, more importantly, their team members. It’s a delicate balance, ensuring the safety of employees while doing the utmost to ensure business-critical systems are up and running. While there is no magic algorithm to employ when it comes to the necessary reallocation of IT resources within our quickly-pivoting enterprises, remote monitoring services may ease the burden a bit by taking over some of IT’s day-to-day operations.
In recent years, there have been many technology innovations that have facilitated the shift from on-premise data storage to cloud data storage, such as creating hybrid solutions or implementing machine learning. Over 50% of an organization’s data is dark, which comes with a great deal of unnecessary and risky costs, such as storage and overhead, maintenance, and time costs. Dark data is the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular activities, but the data generally is never used for other purposes like analytics. Classifying dark data comes with unprecedented benefits that will save organizations money and drive their product innovation and business strategies. In 2019, Gartner analysts believe that a hybrid storage approach will be the norm for IT departments. With data privacy regulation laws rising around the world and the growth of real-time data and forward-looking predictive analytics, it’s essential that companies act fast to classify and clean up their data.
Looking to move past hybrid cloud skepticism within your organization? Here are some best practices to ensure your data is being used to its greatest potential within a safe, controlled environment.
1. Discovery and Analysis
Many data management classification tools come along with data discovery. Businesses have valuable insights within their data that they don’t know exist. Implementing tools that can help you dig deep into your data and allows you to take action on your data will help get this started.
2. Classification and Organization
Failure to remain compliant with data and privacy laws leads to hefty fines and penalties. Organizing data is key to applying data regulation policies to data. This can be done by organizing data by its level of sensitivity or data type.
3. Cataloging and Management
Once all of your data is organized and classified, it is critical to document your findings. This allows people within the company and its consumers to have access to your organizations data and helps to better understand the format of data whether that means unstructured, semi-structured, or structured data.
4. Data Quality Management
It is important to get a feel for both your organization’s and consumers’ data needs so you can meet and exceed all agreed upon expectations. There are many management processes that can be implemented to meet data expectations including—control creation, quality monitoring and reporting, supporting processes, and data incident tracking. Incorporating proper data quality management techniques are crucial in ensuring that your organization has reliable data. Without the right management, unused data can quickly become a burden on an organization.
5. Access Management
Allowing customers to have access to their data is important for an organization to keep in mind. However, it is equally as important to incorporate proper prevention of access to data for those who are unauthorized. Establishing levels of managed access to data is a technique to prevent issues from happening in the future relating to access.
6. Auditing
Auditing and monitoring are key to preventing threats and risks in the future. It is important to audit regularly so that future problems can be acted upon before they occur.
7. Data Protection
Incorporating as many security measures as possible is key to keeping the upmost safety for your organizations data. You never know how quickly you can be hacked, and it can be detrimental to the company.
All of the tips can help your organization improve its data governance strategy especially in terms of migrating to the cloud. Check out our data governance tools and book an intro call with a member of Congruity360, today!
Do you save every email, just in case you need something from it one day? Your inbox is essentially a large lake of water and you just need to get to those buried sunglasses, GoPro, and diamond ring you dropped over the years. Data lakes form when massive amounts of data come in and are stored until you have enough data, that you find what you are looking for. Some may think this is a useful security measure, but that’s not always true.
The benefits organizations can achieve by migrating to cloud environments are extensive and well-documented: businesses can realize increased agility and scalability, improve disaster recovery, strengthen security, and create space for new IT initiatives, among other advantages. But cloud migrations can be complex, costly, and intimidating. Many organizations know they want to leverage cloud technology but aren’t sure how to get started or even what type of cloud environment is best.
