Compliance and Governance
Ensure the security, privacy, and ethical treatment of sensitive information and data within your institution with our specialist management services.
The Challenge
There’s more data being generated than ever, and much of that lives outside of the on-premise datacenter (in clouds, edge locations – in hybrid multicloud environments). Storing it increases compliance and cybersecurity risks, and, of course, costs. How do you know how to store the data appropriately so its cost effective, secure and compliant w/regulations?
Educational institutions see this challenge first hand, they control vast amount of sensitive student and staff information including personal information and academic records.
Research teams handle sensitive or commercially valuable information that and must be appropriately protected. The high value of this information makes Higher Education vulnerable to internal and external threats trying to gain access. Recent research data reveals a 75 percent increase in cyberattacks on Colleges and Universities between 2022 and 2023.
The task of bringing Compliance and Governance under control is not a simple one. There are many obstacles for deploying an institute-wide data governance strategy – the data is often stored in silos controlled by individual teams or departments as well as being dispersed across multiple technologies, and platforms including Public Cloud or as-a-service provided by external 3rd parties. It’s a big job!
Key Questions:
- Do you know what kind of data you have, where it is and who can access it?
- Could you find all personal or sensitive data exposed to the public if you had a data breach?
- How would you handle a subject access request to comply with a legal request?
How can we help safeguard this data?
Visibility is the first priority. Only when you can see your structured and unstructured data can you start to review and classify it. You must be able to understand what is being stored, identify compliance gaps in order to prioritise and plan remediation. If done right visibility can also be used to foster a culture of responsibility and accountability further reinforcing compliance efforts.
Data Protection must be the priority. Before you can protect it, you have to firstly know where is located, identify the type of information stored and therefore the appropriate level of protection required along with the likely recovery scenarios. Examples of protection could include:
Storage based snapshots and replicas
Immutable copies of data
Offsite, air-gapped backup
Privacy and security has many aspects to it, specifically focusing on data governance and compliance the key is to detect, report and remediate things such as open permissions, where the level of sensitivity does not reflect the permissions assigned to it, Identify personal identifiable information (PII), or other sensitive information.
Optimisation of data plays a key role by eliminating redundant or non-business data, or data that is duplicated. Reducing data stored also make your attack surface smaller As well as ensuring compliance it will likely also hep with cost, storing TB’s of data that should not be there that is also snapshotted, replicated, scanned, etc is wasteful, consuming vast amounts of datacentre space and energy and is not contributing any value for the institution.
Policy control allows you to start tagging data, and starts to provide the ability to warn the user of non-compliance or even automatic deletion. Ultimately policy control is designed to help prevent the problem happening in the first place
Why Proact?
Proact are experts at managing all types of data and sensitive information. We work closely with our clients to help them remain compliant with regulations and guidance.
Get in touch with specialists today.
- We provide backup systems with granular retention management and solutions that enable you to manage your data storage across your entire hybrid environment, identifying files and records that fit particular criteria.
- We provide solutions to maintain data governance across hybrid-working environments, ensuring the benefits of collaboration, alongside tight controls and data visibility so your business remains protected.
- All our datacentres are located within the UK. Not only do we guarantee data sovereignty, but we can also pinpoint the server and storage infrastructure in which your data resides, so in the case of any security or data issues, we can quickly identify and triage the affected systems.
