Conquering Data Sins of the Past

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?!?

Businesses have traditionally tried to solve this problem through the application layer (where users ultimately interact with the product) but with today’s explosive data growth, that methodology simply will not work anymore. “Over the last two years alone, 90 percent of the data in the world has been generated” according to Forbes. Think about that for a minute – how can any organization be expected to clean up all of its old data, while new data is created faster than ever before, and with more regulations bestowed on it? The only way to effectively solve this problem is to look at the organization’s data set in its entirety and make sure all of the new policies you are implementing carry through, all the way to the oldest piece of data storage you have sitting in your business (the saying: “you are only as strong as your weakest link” comes to mind). Clean up all of your latest and greatest data repositories as fast as you wish (Teams, Slack, social media platforms, etc.), these are only the tip of the iceberg; the real risk lies underneath the application layer, where all of this data finally lands and has been landing for decades: the infrastructure layer!

Isilon, NetApp, VMAX, VNX, HDS, Data Domain – you name it, it all has been a dumping ground for decades, creating any CISO’s worst nightmare when trying to clean up data and implement a go-forward governance policy.

Remember, an application is designed to provide functionality to the business, but the infrastructure is put in place to support all applications by receiving, storing, and providing data when the application calls for it. Why is all of this important? The reason is simple— businesses have only focused on data cleanup through the application layer because that is how the market historically delivered that solution. These applications, by nature, are lightweight and do not hold data for long. Instead, the applications write to the infrastructure layer to allow for proper storage of the data created from within the application. So how can data be properly cleaned up, if you are only addressing the smallest part of the data set? … the part that is not meant to store data to begin with. Only the underlying infrastructure paints the full picture of exactly how clean an organization is with respect to its data. Clean this up and you can finally start to control your data again and turn it back into as asset instead of a burden!

Point solution after point solution dominated the market for years, created by the big governance players to try to solve this longstanding problem. Unfortunately, their tools were created in a day and age that didn’t consider the policy enforcement that’s required in today’s world, nor the explosive data growth that the Internet of Things has created. These traditional players have too much technical debt to deal with modern real-world problems, so they keep addressing governance policies through application after application. As a result, they are stuck in a frustrating cycle of never achieving their desired business goals. All cloud journeys take too long, on-prem clean-up never happens, and businesses are forced to continue to buy more and more storage to keep up with data growth, all while still bearing the unnecessary risk of old data that yields no business value.

At Congruity360, we see it differently and have built a platform to attack this problem from a different angle – and the results are staggering. With our manage-in-place solution, all of your data stays behind your firewall while we attack the entirety of the infrastructure layer to allow for immediate, proper, data mapping and discovery. Unlike other solutions, Congruity360 does not just address the metadata layer; we actually allow you visibility into the content of that data, petabytes at a time, to actually provide the business outcome you want: –> lower ongoing storage costs, less risk, and more agility! Classify360, Congruity360’s data classification and governance solution is the best tool on the market to clean up the sins of the past quickly while also future-proofing all the new data being created within your organization.