BandL Weblog

Your Next Big Career Move: Data Management?

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When you think about what might lead to the next step forward in your career, data management might not be at the top of your list—but maybe it should be. That’s the conclusion I came to earlier this week on reading “5 Hot Tech Projects to Boost Your IT Career” on CIO.com.

The article highlights the five projects that the author believes “will make you a hero to upper management while enabling the organization to move forward.” And, while these projects aren’t all data management projects in name, it struck me that data management and storage are key components of all of these hot projects. Take a look:

1. Streamline your company’s data: The article focuses on the importance not only  of getting a handle on big data at the macro level, but also on developing the agility to isolate subsets of actionable data to allow the business to make critical decisions. My add: The foundation of success here is to manage big data in a way that enables the organization to find and use it, as well as store it all economically, reliably and securely.
   
   
2. Master your mobile devices: Success in this area depends on balancing user demands (often those of the senior execs who hold your career fate in their hands) with the importance of data protection. My advice: You need a mobile device usage policy, a mobile device management strategy and a secure and economical way to store the added data volume.
   
   
3. Become a devops shop: This project is about seamless collaboration between your development capability and operations—which, according to the article, requires a culture change. Again, it comes down to data. IT needs to better understand how the business will use the data in order to develop applications and infrastructure that best support the organization’s goals.
   
   
4. Create a crisis response team: The author focuses here on general disaster response/business continuity planning, and data backup and recovery obviously have an essential role here too. This is one project that might not necessarily boost your career prospects if you do it right, but can quickly sink you if you miss the boat.
   
   
5. Gain control over social media: In addition to the need the author cites to develop and enforce social media use policies, success also requires organizations to efficiently capture, manage and store the huge volumes of data produced by social media—not to mention in a way that mitigates legal and compliance risks.

So, while at first blush, data management might not appear to be the strategic rocket fuel that will launch your IT career into the stratosphere, it certainly is one of the building blocks of success with these hot projects.

Are all of these projects on your short list? Which others do you see as career critical in the next 3-5 years?

 

3 Things to Consider When It Comes to Cloud Compliance

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Among the new challenges and unsolved mysteries presented by cloud storage, how to maintain compliance in a cloud environment is one of the most daunting for firms in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare. The regulatory issues and security concerns that these firms already are dealing with are “amplified” in the cloud, as one security expert recently put it. Security, this expert concluded, is still playing catch-up with the rapidly evolving cloud service model—no small consideration for organizations that must keep their data protected and secure or suffer the regulatory consequences.

Thinking of leveraging cloud data storage in a regulated industry? Here are three things to think about that can help keep you in compliance:

1. Manage the activities of those “shadow IT departments” within your organization—you know, the project team that decides to try out Google Docs, or the marketing department that opts for a new online collaboration tool. Years ago, storing data externally required a lengthy vendor selection and contracting process. Today, anyone in your organization can move data outside your organization in an instant by tapping into a cloud solution, unwittingly creating a compliance risk. Have a clear data storage policy that addresses cloud solutions, educate your people on it and enforce it.
   
   
2. Choose a provider with care. Clearly, you’ll want to be very thorough in your due diligence in selecting a cloud service provider. If you’ve done any thinking at all about storing data in the cloud, you’ve probably considered that performance, reliability, security, cost and other factors should play heavily into your vendor decision. You might also want to seek out a vendor specifically compliant with the relevant regulations—Amazon Web Services for PCI DSS compliance, for instance. (Keep in mind the vendor’s compliance doesn’t automatically make you compliant, though.
   
   Also consider the existence of specialized cloud service providers whose sole purpose is to store data for one specific industry or another. These providers are well schooled in the practices and controls required to maintain compliance with industry-specific regulations. Bloomberg Vault, for example, stores messages for compliance demands for financial services firms, as well as offers real-time policy management searches and flags messages for compliance issues.
   
   
3. Segment your data and use a tiered storage model. Some data just isn’t destined for the cloud. Do you feel 100% confident that you know where the cloud service provider is physically storing all of your data, how many copies have been made, whether data has been changed, if it’s completely deleted when requested, or whether it ever leaves certain countries or jurisdictions? Some regulations require that you can confidently answer a long list of specific questions about how your data is being managed in the cloud. If you want to gain the efficiency benefits of the cloud while eliminating these uncertainties, consider segmenting out public and non-public data. Public data could be stored in the cloud, while nonpublic data, such as personal health records, that must be stored for the duration can be archived securely, reliably and affordably in house on tape.

Clearly, firms in regulated industries have a lot to think about when it comes to the cloud. Time will tell whether cloud security becomes robust enough to erase compliance concerns, but for now the smart money is on a tiered storage strategy that aims to store the right data sets on the right storage media.

Storage Tips from the Kings of Big Data

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Big Data might be the next big thing in terms of helping companies better understand and meet customer needs, but it’s far from easy to manage. As organizations everywhere struggle with the challenges of storing huge files and creating long-term archives—all while making the data accessible—some of the companies dealing with the largest data stores (numbers like 450 billion database objects and 40 TB per week) recently shared their best practices in “Storage Tips From Heavy-Duty Users” on CIO.com.

Here are some of the tips offered by the Library of Congress, Amazon.com and Mazda, which might provide some thought-starters for how your own organization can better manage Big Data storage.

1. To keep scale under control, consider having infrastructure in a primary location that handles most of the data and a second location for long term archiving.
   
   
2. Contain costs by storing seldom accessed content offline and on tape.
   
   
3. Use parallelization to split files into smaller, more manageable pieces.
   
   
4. Manage file corruption diligently, as even a low failure rate can mean lots of errors to manage when data stores are so massive.
   
   
5. Use virtualization to reduce hardware costs, stop server sprawl and streamline disaster recovery.
   
   
6. Implement a tiered storage strategy, with inactive data quickly migrating to low-cost, reliable, secure, environmentally friendly tape.

What about Google, MasterCard, the federal government and other big data “kings” who are managing some of the most massive data stores in the universe? As these and other leaders continue to get their arms around Big Data, there might well be some lessons from their experience for those of us managing smaller—yet no less critical—Big Data stores. 

How is your organization coping with Big Data storage? What have you learned along the way—on your own or from another organization—that had helped you in this challenge?

 

 

Don’t Let a Data Breach Kill Your Corporate Reputation

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Following a data breach, companies undoubtedly tally the financial impact in terms of the time and money it takes to respond to and recover from the breach—but do most organizations also quantify the impact on their corporate reputation or brand value? If yours doesn’t, it should. A recent survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Experian Data Breach Resolution tells us the reputational cost is far from chump change. According to the survey, the average loss in brand value as a result of a data breach ranges from $184 million to more than $330 million. This amount equated to somewhere between a 12 percent and a 25 percent loss of brand value. The survey also indicated that it takes an average of a full year to restore a company’s reputation following a breach.

Corporate reputation and brand value can seem like fuzzy, abstract concepts that are difficult to measure, but this survey reminds us that they have a decidedly concrete financial impact. The fact that public companies quantify their reputations as “goodwill” on their balance sheets also reminds us that the way our stakeholders view our organizations really is an asset to be valued and protected.

A positive reputation drives cold, hard business results, from making customers more likely to buy your products, to reducing your cost of capital and raising your share price. Goodwill builds over years and even decades, as customers, prospects, shareholders, regulators, the media, the community and other stakeholders learn to respect and trust your organization. And it can be destroyed in an instant by a data breach. One of the fastest ways to damage your reputation is to lose backup tapes or have to notify tens of thousands of customers that their sensitive data has been compromised due to inadequate security measures.

Keeping your reputation intact is a twofold effort:

1. Protect your data with an information security program that doesn’t cut corners and takes into account all possible types of threats. When it comes to data tape security, for example, we advise clients to follow basic tape management best practices, like encryption, backup testing and validation, and secure transfer procedures, as well as tape management solutions to track, move and protect media across all sources and platforms.
   
   
2. Plan for how you’ll handle a data breach, if and when it happens. Despite the most diligent efforts, data breaches still do happen. But don’t let poor handling of a breach harm your reputation more than the breach itself. Make sure your organization has a comprehensive data breach response plan for being, as Visa advises its merchants, accurate, fast, open, honest, transparent, accountable, and thorough in responding to and communicating about a breach.

Have you experienced the reputational buzzkill of a data breach? How did your organization recover its lost goodwill—or did it?