The launch of the latest version of the Data Governance Edition (DGE) is a watershed moment for Dell Software Group. When we first launched DGE it was targeted at the compliance and business owners in an organization – not solely at the IT department. DGE protects an organization by giving access control to the business owners who actually know who should have access to which sensitive data. Business owners are granted the power to analyze, approve and fulfill requests to files, folders and shares across NTFS, NAS devices and SharePoint. This allows end-companies to understand WHO has access to WHAT data and to ask the analogous question of HOW did a person get access to this data, file or resource?
The watershed moment is that with this latest release we are adding the capability to do automated classification of unstructured data. That means we can discover whether a file, spreadsheet, PDF, Word document or other non-database object has classified information in it. What is classified information you ask? Well, that can be credit card numbers, driver’s license or passport numbers, social security numbers or other government/citizen information. In addition to finding this type of information we provide a flexible interface that gives a company the ability to search for other information inside documents. A good example would be giving a customer the ability to search and find any document with the word “Confidential” in it, or “Restricted”. Actions can be taken to automatically classify that document and alert the business owner to the discovery of that data and even to give the business owner a choice of additional actions that could be taken like to increase the security on that file or directory to further protect it.
Why is this important? In today’s regulatory environment – which is a world-wide and not just US problem – companies are being held to very high compliance standards. You not only need to know where this type of information is but you need to have an effective protection plan. And that protection plan is as much to protect your sensitive data from outside threats as it is to protect you from threats within your own organization.
If you want to read more about the launch of DGE and our new Classification capabilities please check out these links:
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=15027
and the press release here:
http://www.dell.com/Learn/us/en/uscorp1/secure/2013-06-10-dell-software-identity-manager
Cheers,
Jackson Shaw