Data is growing faster and faster, and it’s easy to fall behind on managing this explosion. A modern data management solution holds the key to better security, improved cost control and superior services for citizens.
By 2025, it’s estimated humanity will produce 463 exabytes of data every day – the equivalent of nearly 213 million DVDs. And 2025 is just around the corner.
The amount of data we produce globally is growing by around twenty per cent every year, and Australia, with its relatively tiny population, accounts for about six per cent of the total.
For the public service, managing this data explosion is a formidable task, one made harder by the tendency for agencies (and the public sector isn’t alone in this) to hang on to every piece of data it has ever collected instead of aging out what’s not needed.
If the much publicised hacks of 2022 taught us anything, the lesson is there’s no need to hang onto irrelevant personally identifiable information (PII) if it doesn’t contribute to delivering services today.
The question needing to be asked is how can the public sector get a handle on the huge volumes of data being generated every second of every day?
The answer is to take a holistic view of the data estate, says Jonathan Hatchuel, Director of Public Service and Enterprise at Commvault, and then putting appropriate governance and leadership in place to oversee the data.
The importance of cyber-resilience
The public sector needs to understand what data it has, and then ensure it’s classified appropriately and linked to ensure timely and efficient services are delivered to taxpayers. And it also must age out old or irrelevant data, improving transparency and trust with citizens who are – rightly – concerned about the amount of data being held on them and what it’s used for.
“If data is allowed to just grow and grow you end up with a situation where you have just too much of it, and it potentially exposes you to unnecessary risk,” says Mr Hatchuel.
Obviously, there are agencies – such as the ABS – where having a vast amount of data is core to its mission because it can draw deep insights from its holdings. But for some agencies, leadership must have a conversation about the data estate and what data it should hold, and what data must be aged out or removed altogether.
This is where a modern data management solution comes into play. By understanding the data you hold, as well as where and how it’s stored and who has access to it, CIOs can gain insight and have a line of defence in the event of a significant event like a data breach or ransomware attack.
“It’s not a matter of if you are going to be attacked, it’s a case of when,” he says.
It could be a malicious attack from outside, or it could come from inside, with a user clicking on a phishing link and then unleashing ransomware into your systems. The reality is a breach is going to happen.
“Having a data management and protection platform that acts as the last line of defence so that you can recover quickly is really important,” he says. “And as a consequence of the maturing, ever-evolving and more sophisticated threats that exist in the market today, that last line of defence has to have cyber-resilience built in.”
The issues with unchecked data growth
As important as cyber-resilience is, there are also other issues associated with the unchecked growth of a data estate. Top of mind for public sector CIOs is keeping an eye of the purse-strings and being accountable to taxpayers for the money they spend.
Massive amounts of data cost a similarly large amount of funding to maintain, says Mr Hatchuel. “You have to put data somewhere and managing the cost is very challenging for CIOs.”
A modern data protection and management solution allows CIOs to manage their data estates in a cost-effective way, as well as keep it secure. The solution should also protect and manage external data sources which, in a contemporary environment, could be a new public cloud service.
“Data can pop up anywhere, so you need a holistic solution able to look across the whole data estate and manage and understand different data sources. CIO’s are also advised to understand the Shared Responsibility model of most public cloud services; for the majority of providers, that burden falls to the customer.”
And with human resources being a sticking point for many IT departments, it’s also important to automate as much of the data protection and management as possible. This means there’s less chance for error and it also scales – given the massive growth in data, even with old information being aged out, getting a handle on the data pool is a monumental task.
“The final aspect of modern data management is flexibility. Having a tool that can be deployed on-prem, in the cloud or consumed as Software-as-a-Service allows you to protect any environment, any size data set, and any type of hosting,” he says.
