The NogaLogic Methodology
Effectively Managing the Unstructured Data Lifecycle
- Bring order and good governance to information chaos
- Understand the information lifecycle to intelligently define and apply the right policies and best practices for your organization
- Fulfill security and compliance requirements
- Reduce the costs of data management and governance, storage and operations
- Enable users to get full business value from all your unstructured data
- Leverage a common methodology across your diverse data management challenges
The Unstructured Data Management Challenge
Your organization has terabytes of unstructured business data—including multiple copies and versions of the same documents—scattered across many different and broadly distributed repositories. Managing all this unstructured data is a difficult and complex challenge. You need to secure sensitive files, control the cost of data storage and retention, ensure compliance with regulatory mandates, enable business users to quickly find the documents they need, and much more. The better you meet this challenge, the more successful your business can be in today’s information-centric marketplace.
Do You Really Know What your Data is Doing?
Effective data management requires more than just a bunch of technology products that provide point solutions to specific problems. To effectively govern your unstructured data, you first need to understand the way the business actually uses this data—the reality of how and why your data exists as it does. Where are files saved? Why? Who is making new copies and versions? To whom are documents being sent? How many times are files being emailed? Who is accessing these files?
Only after you have a clear understanding of your data can you then intelligently define and implement the right policies and best practices for managing and protecting your unstructured data throughout its lifecycle—and thereby bring essential order and accountability to an otherwise unacceptably chaotic data environment.
The Nogacom Methodology: Effective Lifecycle Management for Unstructured Data
Nogacom delivers an effective methodology for data lifecycle management that addresses the competing and potentially conflicting requirements of the business, IT, security and compliance—enabling you to achieve your data governance objectives. This methodology is comprised of a four-stage cycle: Assess, Define Policies, Enforce & Monitor, and Measure Success.
Assess your data situation. The first step is to understand the current state of your data environment.
NogaLogic discovers and classifies all unstructured data based on its business context, mapping it to its business processes and thereby providing rich insights into why and how data is used throughout its lifecycle and across your organization.
With NogaLogic you can:
- Identify all unstructured data (including all copies and versions) based on its business value—regardless of file name, location or format
- Capture all information about those documents—including usage, permissions, location, distribution, age, author and other parameters
- Get insight into document content and the specific differences between versions of the same document
- Map unstructured data to its storage infrastructure
Through this process you will gain full visibility into how your data is used and the formal and informal business processes that created your current data environment. Then you can analyze the differences between the current state of your unstructured data environment and the desired one.
Define your policies and controls. Once you understand your unstructured data environment, you can now make the necessary changes that address your information management, security, compliance and control needs, while ensuring that users can get optimal business value from your unstructured data assets.
During this stage you should:
- Define business best practices
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Intelligently create new policies or update existing ones. For example, with NogaLogic you can define a policy that immediately restricts access to any document related to a particular project and migrates it to a secure server. Or you can define a policy that moves any file that hasn’t been accessed in nine months—and that does not meet certain exception criteria—to tape backup. NogaLogic’s policies can be defined using any combination of attributes related to their business value. And they can be as granular and complex or as broad and simple as you need them to be.
- Implement controls and educate users
Enforce and monitor. Once you have defined your policies, controls and practices, the next step is to implement them - and to monitor their execution within the context of the business process.
You can automatically implement your policies using NogaLogic and/or leverage your other data and security management tools for enforcement. NogaLogic can also automatically discover any new or updated documents governed by your policies and automatically apply those policies to them, too.
Measure your success. After your initial implementation, you should use NogaLogic to determine how effective your policies and other changes have been—and to what extent users are complying with or working around them. It’s particularly important to pay attention to the proliferation of copies and different versions of documents, because users are often prone to create them in violation of a business best practice. You can also use NogaLogic to watch for unusual usage or distribution of data.
If needed you can fine-tine your policies, adjust business practices, re-educate users, or make a conscious decision to accept certain known risks in order to gain certain known business benefits.
Your data environment is constantly changing. So, each time you complete one cycle of the methodology, you need to once again assess how data is being used—and then adaptively modify your policies to address changes to your organization such as M&A activity, new regulatory mandates or changing business practices.
The NogaLogic methodology is ideal for a wide range of information management and governance business challenges including:
To optimize data management and governance across your organization, contact Nogacom today >>>