Managed Cloud Data Security

Companies continue to struggle with the ever-growing mountains of data flowing into and out of their systems. Gone are the days of manually filing a couple of hard-copy records per day. Now, information workers send and receive on the average 50 MB (or more) of data per day. The sheer data volume of employees must deal with cause numerous issues, including what data to keep and delete, how to secure sensitive data, ensuring data privacy for customers and employees, and providing accurate and streamlined litigation response.

As more companies move their data to the cloud, the question of data sovereignty is becoming a hotter topic. Data sovereignty is the requirement that digital data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is collected or processed. Many countries have requirements that data collected domestically must stay in that country. They argue that it’s in the Government’s interest to protect their citizen's personal information against any misuse. 

Everyone leaves the company eventually. Better opportunities, reduction in workforce actions, termination, or your manager has the IQ of a stuffed animal. No matter the reason, everyone eventually leaves. In the EU, these people are referred to as “leavers,” and depending on the circumstances, more colorful names. However, the way a company handles these departing employees can mean the difference between business as usual or major customer satisfaction issues, project delays, higher eDiscovery costs, compliance risks, and lower productivity. When an employee is terminated or leaves on their own, the company’s HR organization usually (hopefully they have one) pulls out a checklist of things to do before the employee departs. In many cases, the checklist does not address the most valuable employee asset…information.

Over the years I’ve written a lot about the benefits of enterprise file consolidation, i.e., storing and managing unstructured data in a common repository.  In fact, most companies still have data spread around the enterprise in distinct stand-alone data silos (usually unmanaged at the file level) including custodian computers, removable media, personal cloud accounts, file systems, email systems, and SharePoint servers (to name just a few). Companies run the risk of experiencing eDiscovery and regulatory issues, the inability to run effective data analytics processes, and lower employee productivity.

Companies moving to Office 365 must decide what they should do with their on-premise compliance journals. The issue is Office 365 does not allow for journal mailboxes, so many companies have created workarounds. They include: Utilizing shared mailboxes for journal data Exploding legacy journals so they can migrate the journaled individual emails into the associated custodian mailboxes Keeping your on-premise Exchange server active is expensive. Using a proprietary third-party cloud is also expensive and risks the issue of vendor lock-in, otherwise known as data prison.

So, you’ve decided to move your on premise email system to Office 365/Exchange Online for cost savings, higher security, and scalability. However, before you begin the migration, a question you should ask is; does my organization journal email for compliance, legal, or business requirements? If your company does, then read on.

The question of whether moving to the cloud has cost advantages over that of staying on premise continues to be discussed in industry publications. Some industry analysts suggest that all things being equal, OpEx strategies should cost more than CapEx… but does it? Lets first briefly explore the definitions of the two strategies and then dig deeper into the numbers that layout the true cost of ownership (TCO) of moving to the cloud.

Microsoft has just published an in-depth vendor story on Archive360 titled “Intelligent information management ISV uses Azure to give customers fast, flexible insights at a lower cost.”