Why it’s important to have an effective data governance and compliance strategy to support your digital transformation journey.
The digital transformation is not only making access to information faster, easier, and more efficient, it’s also creating new challenges for how we manage our most valuable asset—data.
Many business and technology leaders are unable to answer even the most basic questions about their data: Is it protected? Where is it located? Who has access to it? What does it contain? How long should it be retained? And most importantly—how can the data be leveraged to create a competitive advantage in the marketplace?
The answers to these questions will define your data governance strategy.
The Problem
In a nutshell, data governance is about accessing, managing, and protecting data. A successful data governance strategy is at the crossroads of meeting user demands while maintaining business compliance, whether industry mandated or self-imposed.
Legacy security tools like antivirus software and firewalls are designed to protect structured data—that is, machine-produced data organized in a relational, searchable database. However, as more and more enterprises embark on a digital transformation journey, structured data accounts for an increasingly smaller piece of the puzzle.
Unstructured data—audio, video, images, and documents including PDFs and emails—accounts for 80% to 90% of enterprise data according to industry analysts. And that number is growing at a rate of 62% per year.
The first consideration is data loss prevention, that is, protecting against unauthorized access to or corruption of data and ensuring that sensitive data isn’t transferred outside of the network, either purposely or erroneously. And then there’s data management—managing what happens to it, where it moves, how it’s searched, accessed, delivered, and analyzed.
The Solution
Object storage is a software-defined, scalable solution to store individual pieces of data as objects with a unique global identifier and a set of searchable, sortable metadata. Object storage makes it easier to protect, store, share, search, and analyze all data, including unstructured data—this is crucial to organizations that exist in highly litigious and increasingly regulated industries like healthcare and finance. These industries in particular are required to manage massive amounts of data, increasing exponentially on a daily basis.
The Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) is a fully integrated, scalable object storage solution to collect and securely store data in a centralized environment and create machine-readable content from unstructured datasets. This suite of tools works together to create an efficient, flexible data governance strategy for the most demanding businesses.
Compliance is one of the most basic aspects of running a business, whether it’s compliance with a business’s self-defined policies or those of a regulatory commission. It’s an ongoing process, and one that can be tedious and time-consuming when the right tools aren’t put in place. Compliance involves both the processes used to adhere to policy and proof that the processes have been followed.
Regulatory compliance, an important driver of data governance, generally includes knowing every word or number contained, quick and accurate searchability, and the ability to produce any given data point if requested for any reason. Compliance is growing increasingly difficult as the sheer amount of data compounds while industry regulations multiply across a number of verticals. HCP provides a single solution to ensure data compliance while boosting workforce productivity and offering high-performance analytics that can be used to investigate trends and uncover new business opportunities.
HCP Anywhere provides increased productivity through streamlined mobile collaboration while the Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) provides flexible, low-cost file services for remote sites. Hitachi Content Intelligence (HCI) is an automated data exploration and content analytics solution for sophisticated search and analytics performance. Lastly, HCP makes proving compliance easy; generating audit-ready artifacts is as simple as pushing a button.
Edge Solutions can help you understand the intricacies of your data governance needs and help design a comprehensive strategy for security, speed, access, and compliance. Ready to get started? Contact us today.
ABOUT EDGE SOLUTIONS
The team at Edge Solutions is dedicated to providing creative solutions in a multi-cloud world. By combining deep engineering expertise for next-generation technologies with best-in-class consulting services, we help enterprises drive a cloud-adoption strategy to achieve business objectives. For the latest in technology services and solutions, please contact us or give us a call at 888.861.8884.