Compliance Data Ecosystems: The Role of Risk Managers

As the pace of digital transformation accelerates, organisations face greater security risks associated with data, users, devices, and applications.  

Many organisations are trying to meet compliance requirements and evaluate the risks of data leakage. Figuring out where to start and what to implement can be overwhelming.  

While technology plays a massive part in treating risk, an organisation’s security and data culture, people, and processes play a large role too.  

Data is the new oil and culture is the strategy  

A common challenge many organisations face is a lack of awareness across departments on what their data is and the consequences if there were a data breach. We all know that data is extremely valuable, but It’s difficult to commit to data and security unless we understand how data aligns within an organisation’s strategy.  

Data, sensitive information, and the risk related to its misuse become second nature when working with it every day.  However, to the rest of the organisation a compliance data ecosystem and security are quite abstract concepts. Removing that abstraction so that data is real and relevant is a good initial step to build a security and data culture. Understanding how that data relates to people, processes, outcomes, and measures will help avoid human error and possible data leaks in the future. 

Understanding your critical assets  

Since the global pandemic, most systems and data have grown to accommodate the hybrid workplace. There is data stored on the desktop, spoke servers, with third parties, cloud infrastructure, and it’s all coming together in a very patchwork way. 

This is a challenging environment to understand what the critical assets are. An initial step in the right direction is to identify the primary functions of your organisation and what the critical processes are and reflect that in your architecture to protect assets. 

Workplace without physical boundaries 

We are no longer in a corporate environment where we only access data from the corporate network. Working from networks outside of the control of the IT department presents another challenge. To keep track of where our data is flowing, we are now adapting our boundaries from network to identity. Departments across the organisation are working together using Microsoft 365 to set controls to identify when something is a risk.  

The next step 

Join us for our first episode of the Microsoft data governance, risks and compliance and security webinar series where our expert panel will discuss information security risks and compliance. Learn practical recommendations for an integrated approach to risk management, compliance, and your strategic objective.