Symantec Corp. announced today that it has prepared a data management toolset that it will be eventually be shipping as part of all its product lines over the coming year. The toolset, called Data Insight, leverages Symantec's core competencies of security and storage to enables improved governance, infer data ownership based on usage, and track data utilization.
Data governance and lifecycle management have long been challenges, especially within enterprise environments where data ownership is constantly shifting as a result of mergers, acquisitions, and realignments, Chandra Rangan, senior director of enterprise marketing for Symantec, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We see a lot of customers struggling to figure out who really owns all these files sitting on a disk," he says. "The metadata of the file and the owner that is identified is more often incorrect than it is correct. There are many reasons for this. Data migration happens. Or the person who created the file has left the company, or doesn't really own the file. Somebody else is actually using it to update it day to day. And this has a bunch of business implications. It's very difficult to figure which piece of the business the data belongs to and how to carve it up."
The Symantec Data Insights environment actually monitors the most prevalent users of data sets, providing better capabilities for chargebacks and data governance, Rangan adds.
The automated data owner and identification tool will identify the top five users of data, and well as readers and writers of the data. The Data Insights environment will also provide open share identification, and provide logs of who has viewed the data.
"Data Insights tracks all usage and access to the files, stores them, indexes them with a patent-pending indexing scheme, and analyzes access and usage patterns to come up with insights," Rangan says. "It provides insights on how can we infer ownership of the data, who the real owners are? What these patterns means? So we start getting beyond metadata, and start getting context and insights into what the data really are about."
Data Insights will be bundled into Symantec's Data Loss Prevention solution by mid-year, and into Symantec Storage Management by the end of the year, Rangan says.
For more details, visit the Symantec website.