What is Data Sprawl?
Data sprawl often stems from rapid technological advancements. As businesses adopt new systems and applications, data multiplies across platforms without a strategic plan.
Employee behavior also plays a role. Many individuals create personal storage solutions or use unauthorized tools, leading to unregulated data growth. This can cause critical information to reside in silos.
Moreover, mergers and acquisitions contribute significantly to this phenomenon. Integrating various databases without proper oversight creates chaotic environments where data is scattered. Lack of clear policies exacerbates the issue too. Without guidelines on data usage and management, employees might overlook best practices.
Lastly, organizations frequently underestimate their own data needs over time. What started as manageable information can soon spiral out of control if not monitored diligently.
What is Data Sprawl and Causes
Data sprawl happens when data spreads across various systems, places, and endpoints, including clouds, on-prem servers, and personal devices. The data sprawl is primarily driven by the adoption of applications (especially SaaS). Fragmented data is duplicated, scattered, and becomes unwieldy and hard to manage. The challenges of data sprawl are escalated costs, unmitigated security threats, compliance headaches, and operational inefficiencies.
Rapid Data Generation
Due to such advancements as the digital transformation of businesses, currently data is generated at unprecedented rates. This occurs because of the proliferation of connected devices, social media, sensors, and other data-producing sources. Organizations find the speed and volume of data generation to be overwhelming, and, as a result, they struggle to control data generation.
Proliferation of Tools
Organizations tend to add new tools to their existing stacks. Such tools not only generate data, but they also create new structures that are disconnected from other frameworks. Data silos then result. Such a decentralized approach to tools in an organization increases the risk of unmanaged duplication and inconsistency.
Cloud and Multi-Cloud Adoption:
Cloud adoption is directly correlated with data sprawl. As more businesses move operations to the cloud, the number of endpoints with data is rising exponentially. For organizations using multi-cloud strategies, the ability to control the location and storage of sensitive data across multiple providers is exceedingly complicated.
Poor Oversight:
Data sprawl is also caused by poor oversight from upper management within the business. Autonomous departments or business units advancing the purchase of applications or services outside of formal processes results in additional uncontrolled disparate systems and unstructured data sprawl.
Strategies for Effective Data Management:
Creating a Complete Data Management Plan
In order to address data sprawl, the first thing to do is create a complete data management plan. This means formulating a strategy to manage and control how data is organized across different systems and endpoints. Your plan must include how data is stored appropriately, how and when data is backed up, and how data access is controlled. It should also stipulate how data is kept and how it is disposed of to address data minimization, ensuring only the data that is needed is retained.
Utilizing Data Discovery and Classification Tools
The use of data discovery and data classification tools is critical to finding where sensitive and or critical data is located within an organization’s framework. With tools that use algorithms to scan over and analyze both structured and unstructured data sources, organizations can identify the boundaries of their data. When organizations classify data according to sensitivity and or importance, they can manage how it is stored and how it can be accessed.
Enforcing Data Governance Policies
Fragmented data within organizations is growing due in part to insufficient governance. To resolve this, businesses must implement and enforce comprehensive policies on the handling of company data and information. Policies must cover the assigning and defining of data management roles. The policies must also govern the management and transfer of information to third parties, implement the scheduled auditing of data handling policies, and ensure compliance with CCPA, GDPR, and other data handling regulations.
Consolidating Data
For data sprawl, consolidation is an effective solution. By combining and storing similar data within a single system, organizations can neutralize the issue of multiple duplicate copies of the same information housed in multiple systems and applications. It will also become somewhat more easy to find the data, and even more importantly, the costs associated with data storage will go down.
Monitoring Data
For organizations operating on a consolidated data management plan, routine data surveillance is the next mandatory step. Surveillance of data flows will help organizations identify and shut down activities like the unauthorized transfer of data. Identifying potential risks and taking immediate corrective action will help keep the systems and data secure.
Challenges to Security because of Data Sprawl
The spread of data across different platforms offers a multitude of security threats. When data becomes spread thin, it becomes lost in the clouds, servers, and personal devices, and becomes difficult to manage. When this occurs, the situation becomes costly and unsustainable and offers a higher risk of a security and compliance. This is the beginning of the challenges data sprawl offers.
Security Threats
Data that is spread across unsecured systems is at a higher risk of unauthorized access and a breach of sensitive information. Inadvertently, personal devices that have not been secured may have company sensitive information that is not protected or monitored. When employees perform work on personal devices these unsecured devices may have sensitive company information that is not protected or monitored, leaving it vulnerable to a breach.
Compliance Regulations
Fragmenting data sprawl increasing compliance issues. When data becomes more and more disconnected from the entire data set, it becomes more difficult to manage compliance. Each fragmented system in a data set will increasingly have different regulations to manage.
Inefficiency
Over the last couple of years, operational inefficiencies have sprung due to the wide range of applications, particularly SaaS. Inefficiencies result when several different departments use different applications for the same business functions. This duplication of applications leads to wasted time and poor resource allocation. Furthermore, the absence of integrated files and fragmented systems makes information retrieval and analysis cumbersome.
Increased Costs
Earlier, we discussed the cost implications of data sprawl. Duplicate data and storage, and resource consumption for running several systems, leads to increased costs. In addition, uncontrolled data spread, present at several weak endpoints, may cause data breaches, resulting in expensive litigation.
Management Overhead
Lastly, the overhead of managing widespread uncontrolled data systems and resources is considerable. Organizations lack the means to efficiently coordinate resource systems, data movement, and safety protocols, leading to poor data governance.
Best Practices for Maintaining Data Governance and Security
Maintaining data governance and security is crucial in the age of data sprawl. Start by establishing clear policies that define who can access what information. This creates a structured approach to managing sensitive data.
Regular audits should be part of your routine. They help identify vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with regulations. Keeping track of where your data lives is essential for effective oversight.
Employee training plays a vital role too. Ensure staff understands best practices related to data handling, including recognizing phishing attempts or unauthorized access.
Implement encryption for sensitive information both at rest and in transit. This adds an extra layer of protection against breaches.
Lastly, utilize robust monitoring tools like Nfina-View to detect unusual activities in real-time. Quick responses can mitigate potential risks before they escalate into significant issues.
Better Managed Data Services Solutions from Nfina
Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud solutions are meticulously designed to combat the pervasive issue of data sprawl, which can often overwhelm businesses with unstructured and scattered information across various platforms. By offering comprehensive data center and storage management services, Nfina empowers organizations to off-load their IT operations either directly to us or through a trusted Nfina Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner.
This strategic delegation allows you to concentrate on achieving your business goals without getting mired in the complexities of an optimized IT environment. Our economically viable hybrid cloud solutions cater to businesses of all sizes, ensuring that safeguarding business continuity is both simple and effective.
We understand that every organization has unique architecture needs; that’s why we customize our hybrid multi-cloud approach for each client, guaranteeing that critical data remains protected while being easily accessible whenever required. In addressing the challenges posed by data sprawl, Nfina paves the way for streamlined operations and enhanced efficiency in managing digital assets.
In an age where data sprawl can overwhelm even the most organized enterprises, worrying about how to recover your critical information in the event of a natural disaster or cyberattack is a futile exercise. Nfina recognizes that every byte of your data holds immense value and potential for your organization’s success. Our expert team stands ready to tackle any unforeseen calamity with speed and efficiency, ensuring that both your vital data and operational capabilities remain intact.
With Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud solution, we seamlessly integrate on-site virtual machines (VMs) with robust cluster-to-cluster replication while providing off-site storage dedicated to backup and disaster recovery. This comprehensive approach not only mitigates risks associated with data sprawl but also enhances accessibility, enabling you to focus on innovation rather than remediation when crises arise.