Part of a blog series covering the top five CIO best practices
With the exponential growth of data and the increasing complexity of IT environments, tracking and maintaining control of your enterprise data is more important than ever. The most successful CIOs know that having comprehensive visibility and control is not just a technical necessity but a strategic imperative because it underpins everything else in the operation — from ensuring data security and compliance to predictive analytics and business intelligence.
In working with so many CIOs over the years, Cobalt Iron has discovered a few best practices that all of them follow. Establishing comprehensive visibility and control over IT infrastructure and data is one. (There’s also rapid provisioning, intelligent automation, optimization, and protecting and securing data.)
Carrying it out requires a modern data security solution with certain management characteristics, the two most important being:
Accurate, Comprehensive Reporting
Users throughout the enterprise increasingly depend on ready access to management, administrative, and operational data that supports the claims the business is making. That means IT executives must be able to prove that the data they say is available is, indeed, available. Unsubstantiated claims won’t cut it. In fact, about the only thing that is acceptable these days is near-real-time inspection.
In the area of data protection, accurate, comprehensive monitoring and reporting are essential to an efficient data protection experience. This capability means the IT team can provide continuous data accountability to the business. They can recover data and understand why a failure event or data breach occurred, and they can see what system or function failed. They can also assign internal or external ownership to the problem and prevent it from happening again.
Centralized Visibility and Control
Activity measurement and monitoring capabilities are critical to maintaining compliance, and modern data protection solutions can provide near-real-time reporting on all aspects of data protection within a single unified control interface.
Designed so that anyone can operate it without complex training or technology skills, such an interface makes it possible to execute operational management tasks such as provisioning new systems, changing schedules, adjusting management policies, and more. Users can extend data protection to new systems, apply global policies and best practices, or inspect the automated processes supporting data protection.
When CIOs and IT executives around the world think of modern data protection to make this best practice a reality, many of them think of Cobalt Iron Compass. Compass delivers visibility, reporting, and control in a comprehensive and unified way — so they can easily manage their data and rely on it when it’s needed most.
To find out more about what the best CIOs are doing to keep their enterprise data secure, take a look at our white paper “5 Best Practices CIOs Are Using to Modernize Enterprise Data Protection.”
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