Develop 'Foursight' — Keep Your Post-COVID Transformation on Track

Meeting the growing burden of legal and regulatory mandates is an ongoing, increasingly complex battle. Key to success is the ability to easily manage and analyze increasing volumes of digital information.

Coping with the rising amount and variety of digital information sources has become one of the main challenges for IT leaders. This powerful data is both a key requirement of digital transformation, and a potential compliance risk. Collaborative media platforms like Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and Zoom, can expose sensitive or proprietary organizational information. With remote work — in some form — likely to endure, it makes the problem of balancing today's needs with tomorrow's opportunities a real digital dilemma.

However, by finding the right technology answers to four data safety questions, enterprises can run today and transform for tomorrow.

1. Where is my data — and who can access it? A distributed workforce needs access to organizational data and applications from any device. Without knowing what data is where — or who can access it — many organizations risk multiple regulatory violations, including GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, and Federal FRCP 37(e).

A robust unified endpoint management strategy and endpoint backup solution enables swift and secure deployment, management, and backup. Employees have access to data and applications with multilevel protection. It supports your business today, while advancing your digital transformation agenda.

2. Can my people access the right content, and how do I manage it throughout the data life cycle while remaining compliant with retention policies? Suddenly, sensitive corporate data — anything from contracts to PII — is living outside the corporate firewall and is therefore at risk for multiple regulatory violations.

The right content management or content services solution mitigates that risk today and gives the IT organization data hygiene practices that help meet future regulatory mandates. It ensures a global remote workforce can access the data when and where they need it, while a complete access audit trail meets internal security policies and regulatory mandates. Providing e-discovery functionality for rapid content search and retrieval boosts efficiencies, a key digital transformation journey milestone.

3. Is my data securely backed up, from servers through to endpoints? Many organizations discovered the true cost of abandoning traditional endpoint backup, or backup and disaster recovery systems the hard way. For some, the pandemic-driven flight to the cloud has meant data loss, accidental content deletion, security breaches, malware attacks, and loss of intellectual property.

Studies show the average UK adult loses two smartphones during their lifetime, and their US counterparts lose 70 million devices every year. So, enhance your file sync and share profile by implementing a future-enabled endpoint backup or backup and disaster recovery solution. Encrypting content in databases — behind the corporate firewall or in a certified cloud with redundant and secure data centers — is a business imperative. Meeting current mandates and future demands is where the principles of run and transform meet the real world.

4. Are my communications in a searchable archive where I can perform e-discovery at scale? Social collaboration platforms for remote workers need to be e-discovery-enabled. Without an audit trail, or the ability to capture, search, and monitor work, both content misuse and accidental and malicious insider threats are a real danger.

The right solution stores communications from social collaboration platforms in a central and compliant archive. It ingests and safely retains electronic information — structured and unstructured — including email, images, audio, print streams, and text. This enables the instant access that supports search and export exercises, policy application, and setting data life-cycle management parameters.

Run and Transform — Meeting the Compliance Challenge
If you answered "no" to any of the questions above, you risk compliance violations. Enforcement could expose your organization to fines and penalties that compromise both your ability to do business today and transform for the future.

Living the principles of run and transform may depend on having access to a broad software portfolio and strategic services that bridge the gap between current and emerging technologies. Micro Focus delivers technology and supporting services for managing core IT elements across businesses to help them run and transform — at the same time.

About the Author

Christina Wood serves as Head of Global Marketing for the Information Management & Governance (IM&G) product group at Micro Focus. She is responsible for market strategy and positioning across the IM&G product group. Christina joined Micro Focus in 2016 as part of the acquisition of GWAVA, where she served as CMO, Head of Global Marketing. With more than 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Christina has served within startups and large corporations focused on AI, security, mobility, and is a subject matter expert in information archiving. Christina holds a bachelor's degree in Communication Studies with a minor in Biblical Studies from Azusa Pacific University.