Our business information is not just in storage systems on-site nowadays. It’s in the likes of Box and Dropbox, and in our other web-based applications, such as Salesforce, Office365, Slack or ServiceNow. It’s even in the laptops, smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices that we and our colleagues travel with.
Like it or not, we all have information sprawl, and that reinforces risks and challenges that many IT teams still have problems with for on-site systems, such as backup and recovery, and data governance.
For example, just because we store data ‘in the cloud’, that does not mean it is backed up. Similarly, data maliciously deleted from a web application may well not be recoverable unless we have made specific provision for that – few services provide such a capability unasked. And yes, we can put a second copy of a ‘live’ database in cloud storage, but unless it is specifically implemented as a backup, it is very unlikely that this will allow the relevant application to be restored to a coherent, working state.
Then there is the need for consistent visibility into all our data. This is both for governance and management, and to enable us to analyze and cross-index the data to get information from it – and of course so that we can confirm that we have the necessary consents and permissions to do that analysis.
And lastly, there is the requirement to protect all that data, wherever it may reside. It must be kept secure, and it must also be auditable and verifiable. Let’s look at these key requirements in more detail.
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