Symantec has released Data Insight 4.0, the latest version of its unstructured data governance solution, which provides insight into the ownership and usage of unstructured data, such as documents, presentations, spreadsheets and emails.
“Many organizations are in the dark as to what data they have, what information they have, who owns that data, and the relevance of that data to the business. The unstructured data environment is pretty much like a black hole with limited or no visibility. That lack of visibility is fundamentally a barrier to improving governance,” Ketan Shah, product manager, Symantec Storage & Availability Management Group, told 5 Minute Briefing during a recent interview. The need is significant, says Shah, since 80% of business data tends to be unstructured.
According to Shah, step one to dealing with the problem is finding the data you have; step two is understanding the context including who owns it, how is it being used, its relevance; step three is engaging business data owners because they own it and understand it; step four is applying actions to protect the data in order to curb risk or to better control cost by ensuring the right placement in storage; and step 5 is creating and automating policies so you don’t have to go through steps one through four again. Data Insights provides actionable insight into data ownership usage, access controls, and this helps organizations improve governance to reduce cost and risk, he notes.
The new release focuses on advanced discovery, visualization and analytics capabilities that help organizations improve data management efforts as well as providing actionable intelligence so they can not only find the data, but also fix the problem, says Shah.
Analytics and visualization capabilities in the 4.0 release enable secure collaboration and effective data management. In addition, the release provides a remediation framework that enables customized actions including an out of the box integration to Symantec Enterprise Vault for file archiving and retention management; a query interface to enable ad hoc analysis and support business process integration; and enhanced Symantec Data Loss Prevention integration to improve SharePoint protection.
“We have designed Data Insight as a big data architecture,” says Shah. “We definitely see that the volume of information is large and the velocity is rapid as well so we have designed the architecture to address that.”
Data Insight provides comprehensive support for leading unstructured and semi-structured platforms, such as NetApp and EMC NAS devices, Windows File Servers, Microsoft SharePoint, and Unix File Servers with the Veritas Storage Foundation file system. Data Insight provides further extensibility through a collection interface.
Learn more about Symantec Data Insight at http://go.symantec.com/datainsight.