Successful introduction and continuous application of data governance and compliance practices are an absolute imperative for all organizations. This applies to all data repositories including unstructured data held in traditional file shares, collaboration platforms, private, hybrid and public cloud services.
The Information Governance and Compliance solution area provides organizations with the necessary information to begin applying logical frameworks to unstructured data, to monitor, and to facilitate the organization’s adherence to these frameworks.
Needs Fulfilled
| A complete analysis of all unstructured data to guide classification as record/non-record, IP/public, employee/client/subcontractor PII, inside/outside of retention period, etc. |
| Self-service access to analyses of file service usage that highlight areas of possible non-compliance and guide specific action by data owners. |
| The ability to effect a change in the organizational culture; to create the understanding that responsibility for ensuring data quality is shared by all file service users. |
Unique Features
The following features are only available in the Information Governance and Compliance solution area:
| Text-mining The ability to scan the content of text-based files and identify specific strings, either by simple string matching or pattern matching using regular expressions. |
| Contextual string display Analyses reveal which files contain target strings or patterns and display relevant excerpts from these files to allow the quick identification of false positives. |
Feature Sample
| Scan the full unstructured data environment – SMB/CIFS file shares, NFS exports, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Azure, etc. |
| Provide self-service access to summary and file-level reports of file service use to relevant organizational stakeholders – Data Governance, Data Compliance, Data Protection, Records Management, ILG, etc. (up to 20 individual users). |
| Utilize the benefits of the Data Stewardship Framework solution area and recruit specific data owners to pro-actively manage unstructured data for their department or team. |
| Use View Profiles to ensure that the information provided is relevant and focused on data governance and compliance issues. |
| Analyses based on meta-data provide a powerful insight into file service use. |
| When areas of interest are identified, text-mining analysis (string matching and regular expression) reveals the exact nature of the data. |
| Get assistance from Northern’s Professional Services team in defining the regular expressions necessary to locate specific alphanumeric strings. |
| Use built-in workflows to queue, sign-off and execute actions on selected files. |
| Rely on full logging of actions carried out to ensure all file mitigation is defensible. |
| Demonstrating a functioning practice of compliance monitoring, coupled with remediation workflows, quickly satisfies risk assessment auditors. |
| Regularly and automatically updated file service content reviews minimize the time and effort required to respond to audit requests. |
