With data being the lifeblood of the modern enterprise, it’s no surprise that improving the posture of the data, consolidating copies, removing ‘dark’ data, improving governance, and of course, making sure that all the enterprise’s data is safe, secure, and recoverable are all top priorities for IT teams.
And yet, in practice, few organisations manage their data as a strategic asset. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic which forced the implementation of short-term fixes for business continuity, with little consideration for long-term implications. As a result, organisations today are afflicted by mass data fragmentation, and its several profound impacts.
Siloed data, an emerging challenge
Data has exploded in volume while simultaneously becoming scattered across multiple public clouds, data centres, remote offices, and the edge, with little centralised oversight. In each of these locations, data has become isolated in specialised infrastructure—often from multiple vendors—to manage basic functions such as backup, networking, storage, archiving, disaster recovery, dev/test, and analytics.
It’s worth pointing out that this fragmentation effect is not confined to traditional data centres. Public clouds are an increasingly popular choice to host data and apps, but IT has to deploy supplementary data management functions (typically from different vendors) to handle backups, disaster recovery, security and compliance, and so on, since the cloud providers don’t automatically provide these services. And this even applies to ‘service silos’ in a purely SaaS environment, as we shall see later.
Far-reaching impact
The most obvious downside of having multiple copies of data, residing in systems comprised of solutions from multiple vendors, is the wastage of storage space, and the added complexity of management. Given today’s world of ‘no downtime,’ tighter SLAs, increasing business demands, and slimmer budgets, it is no wonder that IT teams are reporting high levels of stress and even burnout as they grapple with this increasing complexity.
While this is a pressing concern, a more sinister impact of mass data fragmentation is the lack of detailed knowledge about the content, location, owner, access history, or sensitivity of the vast majority enterprise data. The petabytes of information that are being routinely stored without classification, indexing, or tracking lead to the challenge is dark data.
Clearly, this adds considerable risk to the business. How do you prove compliance in handling Personally Identifiable Information (PII), to meet local data regulations? How do you detect anomalous user behaviour or programmatic ransomware attacks? And from an operational point of view, how can you optimise expensive storage by deleting or archiving unneeded data when you don’t know which items to keep?
Cloud agility or fragility?
IDC estimates this year’s increase in spending on SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS by businesses in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) to be 24.5%, 30.6%, and 30.7%, respectively.
Cloud adoption can intensify mass data fragmentation as it results in the generation of data in more locations and in different silos and formats. A common misconception is that cloud providers take care of everything for you, including backing up your data. This is far from the truth, as all major cloud providers employ a shared responsibility model.
A shared responsibility model implies that they’ll take care of physical cloud infrastructure, as in their data centres and servers. But when it comes to your data, it’s almost solely your responsibility to secure, manage, and back up your data. If data was accidentally deleted or if a bad actor employs the latest ransomware scheme to get a hold of your cloud account, you may be out of luck if you didn’t properly back up your cloud data.
Better together: Convergence of IT, security and governance
Now we know what the issues are, how do we solve them? Well, part of good data management requires a collaborative approach with multiple business stakeholders and teams. Although governance and security programs are discussed in various industries today, not many organisations or security professionals fully understand all the aspects that are involved, or the interrelationship between them. However, a major commonality of these two functions is that they both care about risk management. With data as a top strategic asset for businesses, they are both invested in the health of enterprise data. Recognising this will lead to collaboration and the implementation of a cohesive, enterprise-wide data strategy.
While the make-do and mend approach might have been acceptable through the initial turmoil of the pandemic, we’re now past the tipping point. Hybrid work is here to stay! Organisations must recognise and address the challenge of data fragmentation if they want to take the critical step of turning data from liability into asset. Doing so will pave the way for them to then unlock the full potential of their data, allowing them to rapidly gain a competitive advantage in an increasingly data-driven world.
