There is an inherited trust with staff members, peers, vested initiatives, technology, and the business model within the walls of the company. I find it interesting that a Lego building block set, expresses the same principle. The foundation at each tier of the structure is the key for stabilization. An attempt to mask a short coming or a missing piece won’t be evident in the presentation. The visibility will be apparent in the underlining principle or the armor that is designed to shield the intellectual property (IP), the premise for the foundation.
Security is the evolution on how we guard our core essence. I tend to view and grade security as a practice or an extension of the fabric that weaves the company’s reputation.
A Venture Capitalist explicitly seeks the following among other traits:
- Identification of a novel or disruptive technology
- Identifies the required maturity pattern(s) for the company.
- Injects the proper expertise into driving the opportunities.
- Makes an investment to secure the viability in the IP.
Security is often not treated as investiture, but as trust model. There is a distinctive difference in vesting in a structured security as appose to building a security model around trust. When you’re hungry and trying to seek a meal, are you looking to satisfy the craving or adhering towards a diet? Security first and foremost is centered on discipline. It’s time to change the paradigm and reinvest in the fabric.
Security takes on various aspects of an entity life cycle. The entity is identified by what can influence the strength of the armor. The influence morphs into devices, users, practices, and basically anything that can impact the safeguarding of the IP. While there are many contributors, Governance is one of the key focal points. Governance is simply the act of recognizing, understanding, and enforcing compliance.
Typically, governance is applied on the known or established entities. Unstructured data is a realm that falls outside of the known and is the mysterious threat to the very security fabric, which we strive to maintain.
Unstructured data with the proper governance controls and achieves risk reduced in 3 basic principles:
- Data location
- Data ownership
- Data access
The controls helps reduce risk to the corporation in exposure to personally identifiable information, intellectual property, and sensitive data to name a few. Unstructured data if used in a positive and controlled manner helps with analytics. Analytics now leaves the IT realm and enters the digital psychological arena know as predicative analysis. Predicative analysis is an area that is silently becoming the fuel that feeds marketing, behavioral studies, and security trends. We are in an age where unstructured data is in the neighbor of 80% of the corporation’s data consumption. If you view your hard-drive(s) and carefully scan through documents ranging from various file formats, how much of it contains information that should have been categorized / organized in a different light? This exercise alone, gives insight to the weight that has been casted on unstructured data and the solutions that are unravelling before us.