by Angela Guess
David Gibson recently commented on the current state of global data governance. He writes, ” When various global regulations are combined with the rapid growth in organizational data, 50 percent year-over-year, many organizations are not only struggling to comply with data laws, but also to prevent the loss of critical IP and customer data. In 2011 alone, more than 23 million records containing personally identifiable information (PII) were leaked. Research from IDC and other analyst firms show that more than three quarters of data in large enterprises is unstructured, is overly accessible, lacks access auditing and lacks automated analysis of authorizations and use.”
He continues, “In many cases the biggest risk surrounding data does not come from hackers directly compromising customer and employee files, but from employees and contractors with overly permissive access, lack of access auditing, lack of context and lack of automation for the volumes of unstructured data that exist in company archives. To protect this critical unstructured data and comply with global data laws will be costly in terms of personnel and security. For example, the labor expense to manually protect and manage 5 terabytes of unstructured data annually is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
