“Cyber is a big risk – but the bigger threat is not managing data properly” Key Takeaways from the Data Management Summit Virtual 2021

Last week our CEO Simon Cole took part in the Data Management Summit Virtual 2021. As part of this, he spoke in two insightful panel sessions about establishing a robust data-driven regulatory reporting framework and driving successful digital transformation programs.

Simon discussed getting to grips with the risks within data, automation within data management and understanding and putting in place the practices for ensuring sound regulatory control and reporting.

If you missed out, don’t fear, as we’ve written a quick round-up of Simon’s key takeaways from Data Management Summit Virtual.

 The regulators don’t care if it’s unstructured- it’s all data!

“If you speak to the regulator about structured data vs unstructured data, they might look at you blankly because as far as they’re concerned it’s data, and organisations have an obligation to look after all of their information and report against it. The challenges are very well understood with unstructured data – it’s siloed, it’s largely invisible to many people, and it’s absolutely full of risk. It takes a very different, more ingrained approach to get to grips with it given the challenges that it poses.”

Unstructured data has to have some form of structure

“A typical bank we work with has an unstructured data estate of between 2 to 3 PB of data and to put that into context, that’s about 10-20 billion pieces of information that needs to be understood. We typically find about 65% of that information is not valid, it’s not information that should be kept, and is purely introducing risk within the business, so identifying that, siphoning it out, and then being able to manage the rest of that data is a massive challenge. It’s not quite as simple as going to a data lake and searching for set criteria. Organisations have to turn unstructured data into a form of structure so they can then report against it alongside everything else they do.”

Automation has to be a fundamental part of the solution

“You just have to look at the volume and breadth of data that organisations are trying to report against and realise that automation has to be a very key part of data management. We’re getting a glimpse of where the regulators are heading and how they’ve upskilled their teams in terms of data scientists and the capabilities around machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. Organisations really need to be ahead of the game on this because they’re going to be overtaken by the regulator because of their expectations. Indeed, a recent Bank of England report indicated their desire to work in partnership with organisations in terms of automating how they report and what they report on. So, there’s a lot of pressure there…but there’s a lot of benefit as well.”

Organisations need to control risk exposure throughout the entire information lifecycle

“Organisations are very good at manging risk within transactional platforms, those line of business systems, but there’s a lot of risk hidden within plain sight in other platforms….Cyber is a big risk but the bigger threat is not managing data properly. The biggest risk that we see is that organisations really never map those regulatory-based obligations on to their data so regardless of any new Cloud platform and any new infrastructure put in place, the risk is still there.”

Knowing what you have is where to start when it comes to risk management

“Understand the value of the data and the purpose of the data, not only from a business perspective, but also from a privacy perspective and make sure you are mapped right across all of the regulations that you face. Understand the data that you need to keep and understand the data that you have to remove. If you understand what you have, you can then plan and ensure that you get the success you need.”

Risk management of unstructured information is in a different place than 10 years ago

“Thankfully with the hyper-scale of the cloud and the forensic capability with which we can use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, organisations can actually start solving that problem. A decade ago, that was impossible. It’s a different set of tools than managing structured information, but ultimately from the regulatory perspective, organisations need to manage it and treat it in the exact same way with the exact same outcomes.”

If you want to know more about controlling risk within your unstructured data and how automation can play a central role in this, contact us today at info@hivera.com