by Angela Guess
Isabelle Guis, Chief Strategy Officer of Egnyte, recently wrote in CloudTweaks, “Data governance, the understanding of the raw data of an organization is an area IT departments have historically viewed as a lose-lose proposition. Not doing anything means organizations run the risk of data loss, data breaches and data anarchy – no control, no oversight – the Wild West with IT is just hoping for the best. On the flipside, opening the hood and checking if policies or regulations are being respected means you have to do something about it: define new policies and enforce them everywhere you have data, a months long process that involves people’s time, money, developing new skills, external experts and a lot of pain for IT.”
Guis continues, “Content Governance is about understanding the unknowns when it comes to your content and answering questions: what do we know about our content? Is it encrypted and stored at the right location? Are the right people is accessing it? Is this file subject to regulations or is it confidential and protected accordingly? What will be the business impact if it is accidentally deleted? It’s a holistic look at the sum of what is produced by your business. The reality is that all businesses content needs to be governed. In my interactions with customers, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and other peers there are several recurring themes or myths that come up, here’s a look at them and some suggestions for tackling the issues.”
She goes on, “(1) A content governance solution is long and costly to install. We need experts. Historically this has been the case with on-premises solutions that require a lot of servers. The more data to analyze the more servers you needed. In addition, running perpetual license software meant organizations needed costly professional services experts to deploy it. By the time an organization was ready to update its content governance policies IT would usually find siloed, inconsistent and outdated systems – a patchwork solution that had been ignored. This problem is solved with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) content governance solution. No additional hardware, no experts needed. It’s like a whole team of data scientists working for you in the cloud.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ rakyatmalaysia06