Whitepaper 01-02: Integrated Data Management within the Organization

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Today, organizations all share a common challenge in managing and integrating data into a coherent whole. Data does little good unless it is available to support key decision makers as they guide the forward path of the enterprise. In this paper we look at some data integration challenges especially as they pertain to an organization’s need to achieve the full line-of-sight into all required data stores necessary for the best business decisions to be made. The classic CIA Triad requires confidentiality, integrity, and availability for data and information stored by an organization, and we consider how the following data management issues can impact the Triad:

• Information Islands. Useful business data must be available to decision makers. We examine our own isolated business data and discuss how to tie that data into our overall information management framework.
• Investigations in a Vacuum. When different groups make copies of and perform analysis on centralized data, integrity problems can occur. We look at where this occurs within our own organization and our response.
• Audit Dilemmas. Another integrity problem exists when “authoritative” data actually exists as an information island; different groups using this data for analysis can result in contradictory answers to the same question. We examine how auditing tools can be used to uncover these islands.
• Disclosure Protection. Today, it is trivial to copy vast amounts of data surreptitiously using any number of techniques. We examine specific methods for protection against this attack on data confidentiality.

We close this paper by looking at the effect of emerging trends upon data integration.