Want to Drive Data-Driven Decisions? Focus on Your Data Fabric.

Organizations are flooded with data more than ever before - but for most IT and security teams, what should be a powerful resource for driving insights and efficiencies is anything but.

Untapped data potential can hamper business outcomes regardless of what that data covers. When the data is rooted in IT and security, things get dangerous. Inaccessible IT and security data inhibits productivity and spikes cybersecurity risks.

Siloed IT and security data is more than an inconvenience

Research from Ivanti shows that nearly three in four respondents admitted that IT and security data at their organizations are siloed. Roughly the same number acknowledges the critical role of data accessibility — so the problem isn’t a lack of awareness. It’s likely attributable to data overwhelm and the inherent lack of alignment in siloed organizations. 62% of IT professionals report difficulties accessing data across multiple platforms, highlighting the urgent need for a more integrated approach.

Start thinking about your “data fabric”

Data fabric refers to a unified, accessible view of your organization’s data that incorporates data from different systems, teams and sources. Think of it like a single source of truth.

Few organizations suffer from a lack of data, but it’s very common to suffer from a lack of the right data — or a lack of understanding of how to make the data accessible, organize it, and leverage it efficiently and effectively.

Constructing a single source of truth

The power of data fabric lies not just in consolidation, but in the insights it enables. When IT and security teams have a single source of truth, they can make evidence-based decisions (How can we reduce our attack surface?) with less fear of data blind spots (What’s connecting to our network?) or conflicting information (When was this device last updated?).

A common challenge when I recommend breaking down data silos: Who is going to deal with all this data when it’s compiled together? Data overwhelm is very real, and if your departments are overwhelmed with their own siloed data, it can feel impossible to conceive of dealing with the whole, evolving, de-siloed data set.

The good news: no person, team or department has to make sense of the data. Once you’ve established a single source of truth, you can apply AI and analytics to comb through those millions of data points, making connections and mining deep insights that humans alone cannot.

So, how do you begin to construct this data fabric? Here is what I advise:

1.     Engage in Discovery. Where is your data? Who owns it? Where is there overlap? Start with discovery so you’re playing with all the cards.

2.     Define Key Problems: Identify the critical issues your organization needs to solve. This will allow you to triage, deprioritize or eliminate irrelevant data.

3.     Build on a Unified Foundation: After integrating your data sources, layer solutions on top. Expect 80% of the value to come from integrating these core data sources, with the remaining 20% coming from tweaking things to address your organization’s unique needs.

4.     Define Lanes: Just because the data is consolidated doesn’t mean that it’s a free-for-all. Define lanes for different teams to access what they need. The IT team should own IT data, and the security team should own security data. But they’re all building on that same unified fabric as the foundation, and they can be assured that they’re accessing integrated data that has been contextualized within the rest of the organizational data.

A new philosophy

The “data fabric” approach requires a complete rethinking of how data flows through an organization. There may be some discomfort at first — it’s the proverbial “mess in the middle” that you get when reorganizing a stuffed closet, for example.

Technology solutions are an essential component of establishing and managing data fabric. Still, to be effective, those solutions must build on an underlying strategy and philosophy of data fabric. If you haven’t reframed how you approach data organization-wide, any new data intake will end up re-cluttering the closet again.

The benefits of this approach are manifold. By breaking down data silos, IT and Security teams can:

·       Leverage AI and automation to reduce manual labor for IT or security professionals

·       Reduce their attack surface and mitigate risks associated with data breaches, ransomware attacks or network intrusions

·       Drive innovation by uncovering patterns and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed

·       Make data-driven decisions to optimize software licensing costs and invest in the right infrastructure and tooling

·       Streamline service delivery by automatically surfacing relevant asset data

Perhaps most crucially, a well-implemented data fabric strategy addresses a pressing concern in the IT world – data blind spots. With 55% of IT professionals worried about these gaps in their data visibility, the unified approach of a data fabric offers a powerful solution.

As businesses grapple with the challenges of managing ever-growing volumes of data, taking this new approach unlocks true enterprise automation and efficiency. That’s a competitive advantage that can hardly be overstated. Data gaps and conflicts can be devastating from both an operations and cybersecurity perspective.

So go ahead and start weaving that fabric. It’s not only worth the effort — it may be a make-or-break decision.