The compliance issue that many IT organizations are loath to admit is that in the age of the cloud, many of them have little to no idea what data is residing where. Developers and end users now routinely move and copy data with little to no oversight. To enable IT organizations to begin regaining control over that, HyTrust today announced a CloudAdvisor tool that IT organizations can employ to discover what virtual machines and associated data are deployed in both a private cloud and in a local software-defined data center.
Based on data classification software HyTrust gained when it acquired DataGravity earlier this year, HyTrust president Eric Chiu say CloudAdvisor is now available as a virtual appliance that makes it simpler for IT organizations to deploy anywhere.
Chiu say that within a few minutes of being installed, CloudAdvisor starts to discover and catalog all the virtual machines that have been deployed.
“It takes a snapshot of every VM running in the environment,” says Chiu.
Once that virtual machine inventory is established, CloudAdvisor monitors, tracks, and analyzes data-access patterns, data usage and file content. That information can then be explored using data visualization and wizard-based workflows embedded in CloudAdvisor, says Chiu. HyTrust longer term plans to add support for containers in addition to virtual machines to enable IT organizations to keep track of data wherever it goes, adds Chiu.
Data discovery is becoming a much bigger issue for two reasons. First, new regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) being put into effect by the European Union next May hold companies accountable for personally identifiable information (PII). Fines can range as high as 4 percent of global revenues. Secondly, more than a few IT organizations have been embarrassed lately when it’s been discovered they have left critical data unencrypted on a public cloud simply because they didn’t know it was there in the first place.
Very few organizations today do an excellent job of managing data. But as compliance and IT security issues continue to become more challenging, it’s clear just about every IT organization will need to up its data management game or deal with the consequences.
