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Data Storage: Do You Know Where to Find Your Most Sensitive Data?
Do you know where your data is? Not just any data, but the most sensitive and critical data that your company depends on? In a global survey of IT professionals, only 16 percent said that they could locate that information. 24 percent said they had no idea where it is stored, and 60 percent said that they have a limited understanding of where they could look for it.
When limiting the question to just unstructured data, data stored in electronic documents outside of a database, the IT pros are even less sure. Only 7 percent said that they know where to find documents that store sensitive data. 41 percent had no idea and 52 percent said that they had limited knowledge of where to look.
Well, maybe in the defense of IT pros is that they have no business having direct access to sensitive data, although the question was only if they know where to find it. Maybe instead of IT staff, business execs should have been asked if they knew where their sensitive data is — it would be interesting to compare the results. After all, IT staff should be facilitators of managing data and not necessarily privy to the actual data content. But even so, the lot that answered that they had no clue even where to start looking seem to be out of touch with their assigned duty of managing their company’s data.
Larry Ponemon said that “data protection procedures at most organizations are woefully insufficient, as sensitive and confidential data continues to proliferate beyond traditional IT perimeters. The majority of respondents agree that not knowing the location of data poses a serious security threat. Clearly, the time is ripe for a wider adoption of the technologies and expertise to make data-centric security an enterprise priority.”
Sarb Sembhi, an analyst and director with STORM, said that “my observations are that there are very few organisations that can make a strategic decision about their data as whole.” Part of the problem is that often the task of managing business data has been delegated and responsibility spread across 30 or 40 vendors who support the business.
