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Data Security: Securing Data in a World of Off-Premise Storage
It’s well known that the amount of data that organizations need to manage is experiencing dramatic growth, but there’s another parameter at play that is complicating the management of data for many organizations, and that’s the number of locations where data is being stored and the fact that increasingly those locations are off-premise. Gartner forecasts that by 2019, 90 percent of an organization’s data will be stored in off-premise locations.
A top priority of all data management solutions is to ensure that data remains secure, particularly vital and sensitive information. Gartner recommends considering how sensitive personal information can be separated from other data and to reduce or eliminate the risks involved in maintaining it, for example, by outsourcing the handling of sensitive data to specialized service providers.
Carsten Casper, research vice president at Gartner, said that “as the amount of personal information increases multifold, individuals and their personal data will increasingly become a security target. And, yet in most scenarios the organization is still ultimately accountable for the personal data on its IT systems. The time has come to create an exit strategy for the management of personal data. Strategic planning leaders will want to move away from storing and processing personal data in the next five years.”
Casper said that “if control requirements are too strong and implementation is too costly, it would make sense to hand over personal data to a specialized ‘personal-data processor’.”
Gartner recommends the following steps for dealing with the storage of sensitive personal information:
- Identify what is personal and where it is currently stored. Don’t combine personal data with other less sensitive data.
- Create tighter and stronger controls around personal data. Encryption is typically used.
- Set access controls on sensitive data so that it is always very clear about who can see and access the data
- Adhere to privacy and compliance standards
