An Investment Bank
Mass-quarantine enables customer to lock-down nearly half of their data.
The Case
Working with Northern, and using Northern’s software solution, a financial services company was able to significantly improve control over their unstructured data footprint. Work was done by a small team over a two-month period. The Company achieved improved operational efficiency, improved information security, and improved regulatory compliance.
Key operational results
- Gather a clear picture of the current state
- A State Analysis service provided by Northern quickly gave a factual basis for action.
- Confirm ownership of file shares at the department-level
- Making responsibilities clear and enabling department-level experts to be involved if required.
- Perform remedial clean-up
- 7% of top-level file shares were deleted, streamlining the file system structure.
- 1.22 TB was deleted, including redundant and sensitive IT infrastructure information.
- Quarantine aged files
- 8.8 million files (44% of the original data footprint) were quarantined (soft decommissioning).
- Users have a clear and auditable process to request access to quarantined files.
- A single individual within The Company is able to efficiently process restore requests received.
- Prepare for deletion of unnecessary data
- Target files are segregated and staged for deletion.
- Restore request process is refining the data set to be deleted.
- Prepare for directed self-service data management
- Policies and Information Security needs are now much better defined and understood.
- The foundation is in place for data governance services to be provided to data owners.
Work was carried out as follows:
- Infrastructure for Northern’s software was prepared (application server, database, and account).
- Using the software, Northern staff performed a State Analysis review of the data footprint.
- Analysis results were discussed, and next actions determined.
- The software was configured to provide lists of files matching criteria for remedial deletion.
- Staff within The Company, through the interface of the Northern software, deleted these files.
- The quarantine and breadcrumb features of the software we configured to allow restore requests.
- The restore request procedure was documented by The Company and made available to users.
- The software was configured to provide a list of all files not modified in the last 11 years.
- Staff within The Company, through the interface of the Northern software, quarantined these files.
- The software was configured to make a list of all files not modified since November 30th, 2013.
- Staff within The Company followed the same procedure to quarantine these files.
- To-date, a small number of restore requests have been received and processed.
The resource burden for The Company was minimal, with little infrastructure and few individuals involved. The risks of unwanted negative impact to the business were understood and well controlled. The Company was able to use standard tools and simple approaches to achieve very significant impact in a very short space of time.
About the Company
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