Do you ever find yourself going through your desk and finding something, like a USB drive or old Blackberry device and think “huh, I didn’t know I still had this.” The same is true for data. You may own something that you had no idea you had.
As security people who are responsible for ensuring unstructured data is properly protected, we put a lot of responsibilities on our data owners. As a result, data ownership (or finding and maintaining data owners) becomes one of the most important activities when it comes to data governance. However, a lot of times the data owners do not know they own this data; they may not even know the data exists at all. Outside of requests for access or yearly certification campaigns, it’s not something they often have to think about.
This can be a huge problem for both infrastructure and security people because we rely on the data owners to clean up security issues, approve access and decide when data needs to be retired.
Recognizing this issue, we are proud to introduce the My Assets module in SPHEREboard. My Assets was created to provide data owners visibility into the data assets they own and who has access to that data. This tool is meant to be a constant reminder to these data owners that they own and are responsible for this information. It’s a way we can partner with the business to ensure they have awareness, so they are more engaged when it comes time to certify access, remediate security issues, complete migrations or engage with any other work that needs their input.
One added bonus of this visibility is what we call our crowd-source approach to data ownership management. Users have the ability to reassign ownership for assets they no longer own. This self-management approach, along with our ownership algorithms, provides a mechanism to keep this very important aspect of data governance as accurate as possible.
Director of ProductRosario is Director of Product at SPHERE Technology Solutions. As an experienced technology executive with over 20 years of experience, Mastrogiacomo is responsible for the strategy of SPHERE’s suite of solutions including SPHEREboard. Prior to joining SPHERE, Mastrogiacomo held high-level positions at multiple Financial Services organizations; managing technology groups charged with core infrastructure, and end-user products.
Check out some of Rosario’s latest thoughts on Privacy in 2023.
