What Keeps You Up at Night? Insights from a Ponemon Data Access Governance Study

Part 1: Do You Know Where Your Data Lives?

Thinking of all the data that lives across your organization? It’s a spooky thought. According to a recent Ponemon study on the current state of Data Access Governance (DAG), 62% of people have no confidence or little confidence of where users are storing unstructured data.

On the surface, it might seem like a daunting task to figure out where all your data lives. However, with the right tools and a plan, we don’t think you need to worry.

In fairness, we understand why all that data can seem intimidating – it is 80% of all your data after all. That said, effective DAG programs begin with discovery. It’s only after this discovery phase that you can move onto the other four phases of the program: collecting and analyzing relevant information about the data you’ve identified, monitoring the activity around the data, converting to an access model that’s sustainable moving forward, and governing that data once you’ve gotten it into a secure state to keep it that way. (Read more about implementing an effecting DAG program in our DAG 101 Blog Series here.)

But back to the statistic from the recent Ponemon report: this number is significant because it illustrates just how many people have not completed that simple first step. Nearly two-thirds of organizations don’t know where their data lives across their organization. How can you be confident that your data is secure, when you don’t know certain data even exists?

There are many ways to solve this problem And some methods are harder – or more time consuming – than others. You can look manually. You can survey your employees. You can write scripts. You can invest in third-party products designed to make data discovery a much simpler task. However you decide to discover your data, you must know what your data footprint looks like in order to tackle a DAG program properly.

This first step might seem scary, but we know that there are tried and true methods toward completing this first step and eliminating this fear.

Check out the 2018 Ponemon Study on the State of Data Access Governance for more insights and be sure to check back over the next 4 weeks as I break down additional findings from the Ponemon Study. You can also subscribe to receive email alerts each time a new blog in the “What Keeps You Up at Night? Insights from a Ponemon Data Access Governance Study” series posts by signing up here.

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