Secure the Engine to Your Business Future

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People use mobile devices, as James Hailey Jr. blogged, “for almost everything they do in their day to day activities like listening to music, work, social applications, and calendar functions.  They allow people to immediately get information and access different resources.  In today’s world, there are more mobile devices than there have ever been in recent years and companies are just realizing the potential opportunities that exist.”

As Daniel Newman blogged, “cloud, mobile devices, Big Data, and social media have become a permanent fixture of today’s business.  From solopreneurs to global enterprises, companies are more connected than ever before to their customers, employees, shareholders, and stakeholders.  Enabled by connectivity and powered by the cloud, this is more than just Marketechture, this is the engine of our business future.”

“By embracing social tools in the cloud,” Rebecca Buisan blogged, “organizations can now attract new customers while at the same time better serve their existing clients, employees, and business partners.”

While cloud and mobile are enabling social business, it is not all blue skies and rainbows.  The age of the mobile device is still young, so as you embrace, with youthful exuberance, the convenience of the mobile-app-portal-to-the-cloud computing model, convenience should not trump security.

As Marissa Tejada blogged, despite your employees’ hands being full of business-enabling mobile devices, too few organizations are making sure mobility and security go hand in hand.  Especially when BYOD puts personal devices into business hands.

One example Allan Pratt blogged about is iOS7’s AirDrop feature, which uses a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi ad-hoc networks.  “The bottom line,” Pratt explained, “is that while AirDrop may sound like a good idea in theory, it needs more security embedded into it for data transfers to be considered.  For SMBs, this means you should be wary of new technology until it has been proven safe and effective for the enterprise.  You don’t want your data walking out the door without your knowledge.”

With big data providing the 1.21 gigawatts (often with a lot more than 1.21 gigabytes) of power, social, cloud, and mobile technology is the flux capacitor driving companies of all sizes forward to the future of business.  Just as lightning never strikes twice, you don’t want to end up looking back in time, second-guessing why you didn’t secure the engine to your business future.

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Best OCDQ Blog Posts of 2012

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Welcome to my roundup of the best blog posts published on the Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality (OCDQ) blog during 2012.

My selections were based on a pseudo-scientific, quasi-statistical combination of page views, comments, and re-tweets, as well as choosing a few of my personal favorites, and which I have organized into four sections of ten best posts by topic or type.

 

Ten Best Posts on Big Data

  • Dot Collectors and Dot Connectors — The multifaceted challenges of big data require the dot collectors of data management and the dot connectors of business intelligence to overcome their attention blindness and work together more collaboratively.
  • HoardaBytes and the Big Data Lebowski — Don’t hoard Data, dude.  The Data must abide.  The Data must abide both the Business, by proving useful to our business activities, and the Individual, by protecting the privacy of our personal activities.
  • Our Increasingly Data-Constructed World — What we now call Big Data is in fact a long-running macro trend underlying the many recent trends and innovations making our world, not just more data-driven, but increasingly data-constructed.
  • Will Big Data be Blinded by Data Science? — With apologies to Thomas Dolby, will the business leaders being told to hire data scientists to derive business value from big data analytics be blind to what data science tries to show them?
  • The Graystone Effects of Big Data — Using a metaphor based on the science fiction television show Caprica, I refer to the positive aspects of Big Data as the Zoe Graystone Effect, and the negative aspects of Big Data as the Daniel Graystone Effect.
  • Exercise Better Data Management — Big Data may be followed by MOData (i.e., MOre Data or Morbidly Obese Data), but that doesn’t necessarily mean we require more data management, instead we just need to exercise better data management.
  • A Tale of Two Datas — Inspired by Malcolm Chisholm and Charles Dickens, there are two types of data (i.e., representation and observation, not big and not-so-big) with different data uses that will require different data management approaches.
  • Data Silence — Not only do we need to adopt a mindset that embraces the principles of data science, but we also have to acknowledge that the biases and preconceptions in our minds could silence the signal and amplify the noise in big data.
  • The Wisdom of Crowds, Friends, and Experts — The future of wisdom will increasingly become an amalgamation of experts, friends, and crowds, with the data and techniques from all three sources often contributing to data-driven decision making.

 

Ten Best Posts on Data Governance and Data Quality

  • Data Quality: Quo Vadimus? — With lots of help from Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen, Garry Ure, Bryan Larkin, and many others via the comments, I ponder where data quality is going, and whether data quality is a journey or a destination.
  • Data Quality and Miracle Exceptions — Battling the dark forces of poor data quality doesn’t require any superpowers, and data quality doesn’t have any miracle exceptions, so for the love of high-quality data everywhere, stop trying to sell us one.
  • Data Myopia and Business Relativity — Examines the two most prevalent definitions for data quality, real-world alignment and fitness for the purpose of use, otherwise known as the danger of data myopia and the challenge of business relativity.
  • How Data Cleansing Saves Lives — Although proactive defect prevention is far superior to reactive data cleansing, the history of the Hubble Space Telescope proves that data cleansing can be not just a necessary evil, but also a necessary good.
  • Data Quality and the Bystander Effect — The most common reason data quality issues are neither reported nor corrected is the Bystander Effect making people less likely to interpret bad data as a problem or, at the very least, not their responsibility.
  • Data Quality and Chicken Little Syndrome — A chicken-metaphor-based post about the far-too-common and fowl folly of, instead of trying to sell the business benefits of data quality, emphasizing the negative aspects of not investing in data quality.
  • Data and its Relationships with Quality — The metadata linking the data management industry to what it manages suffers from the one-to-many relationships created by never agreeing on how data, information, and quality should be defined.
  • Cooks, Chefs, and Data Governance — Implementing policies requires cooks who are adept at carrying out a recipe, as well as chefs who are trusted to figure out how to best combine policies with the organizational ingredients available to them.
  • Availability Bias and Data Quality Improvement — The availability heuristic explains why a reactive data cleansing project is easily approved, and availability bias explains why initiating a proactive data quality program is usually resisted.

 

Ten Best Podcasts

  • Data Quality and Big Data — Guest Tom Redman (aka the “Data Doc”) discusses Data Quality and Big Data, including if data quality matters less in larger data sets, and if statistical outliers represent business insights or data quality issues.
  • Saving Private Data — Recorded in December 2011, guest Daragh O Brien discusses the data privacy and data protection implications of social media, cloud computing, and big data.
  • Demystifying Master Data Management — Guest John Owens explains the three types of data (Transaction, Domain, Master), the four master data entities (Party, Product, Location, Asset), and the Party-Role Relationship, which is where we find many of the terms commonly used to describe the Party master data entity (e.g., Customer, Supplier, Employee).
  • The Johari Window of Data Quality — Guest Martin Doyle discusses helping people better understand their data and assess its business impacts, not just the negative impacts of bad data quality, but also the positive impacts of good data quality.
  • Defining Big Data — This episode of the Open MIKE Podcast, with assistance from Robert Hillard, discusses how big data refers to big complexity, not big volume, even though complex datasets tend to grow rapidly, thus making them voluminous.
  • Getting to Know NoSQL — This episode of the Open MIKE Podcast discusses how NoSQL does not mean AntiSQL (i.e., NoSQL is not a Relational replacement), and that business-driven big data needs will often require “Not Only SQL.”

 

Ten Best of the Rest

  • DQ-View: Data Is as Data Does — In this short video, I explain that data’s value comes from data’s usefulness, exemplifying the potential value of unstructured data based on whether or not you put what you read in data management books to use.
  • DQ-View: The Five Stages of Data Quality — In this short video, using my superb acting skills, I demonstrate how coming to terms with the daunting challenge of data quality is somewhat similar to experiencing the Five Stages of Grief.
  • DQ-View: MetaData makes BettahMusic — In this short video, I demonstrate how better metadata makes data better using the metadata automatically and manually created after importing my CD collection into my iTunes library.
  • Metadata, Data Quality, and the Stroop Test — In this colorful (and perhaps too colorful) post, I use the Stroop Test, where colors do not match their names, to discuss the relationship between metadata and data quality.
  • Quality is the Higgs Field of Data — Using one of the biggest science stories of 2012, the potential discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson (which I also attempt to explain), I attempt an analogy for data quality based on the Higgs Field.
  • The Family Circus and Data Quality — Thanks to The Family Circus comic strip created by cartoonist Bil Keane, I explain how Ida Know owns the data, Not Me is accountable for data governance, and Nobody takes responsibility for data quality.
  • Data Love Song Mashup — Since your data needs love too, on Valentine’s Day I wrote this post providing a mashup of love songs for your data (and Rob DuMoulin added a few more in the comments) — Happy Data Quality to you and your data!
  • The Algebra of Collaboration — The trick of algebra equates collaboration with data quality and data governance success when collaboration is viewed not just as a guiding principle, but also as a call to action in your daily practices.
  • The Return of the Dumb Terminal — With help from author Kevin Kelly and my old green machine, I ponder how the mobile-app-portal-to-the-cloud computing model means mobile devices are bringing about the return of the dumb terminal.
  • An Enterprise Carol — Jacob Marley raises the ghosts of a few ideas to consider about how to keep the Enterprise well in the new year via the Ghosts of Enterprise Past (Legacy Applications), Present (IT Consumerization), and Future (Big Data).

 

Thank You for Reading OCDQ Blog in 2012

In 2012, the Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality (OCDQ) blog published 92 posts, which received 160,000 total page views, while averaging over 400 page views and 200 unique visitors a day.

Thank you for reading OCDQ Blog in 2012.  Your readership was deeply appreciated.

 

Related Posts

Best OCDQ Blog Posts of 2011

So Long 2011, and Thanks for All the . . . – The OCDQ Radio 2011 Year in Review

2012 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 4)

2012 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 3)

2012 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 2)

2012 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 1)

2011 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 4)

2011 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 3)

2011 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 2)

2011 Quarterly Review of the Data Roundtable (Part 1)

An Enterprise Carol

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This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Since ‘tis the season for reflecting on the past year and predicting the year ahead, while pondering this post my mind wandered to the reflections and predictions provided by the ghosts of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  So, I decided to let the spirit of Jacob Marley revisit my previous Enterprise CIO Forum posts to bring you the Ghosts of Enterprise Past, Present, and Future.

 

The Ghost of Enterprise Past

Legacy applications have a way of haunting the enterprise long after they should have been sunset.  The reason that most of them do not go gentle into that good night, but instead rage against the dying of their light, is some users continue using some of the functionality they provide, as well as the data trapped in those applications, to support the enterprise’s daily business activities.

This freaky feature fracture (i.e., technology supporting business needs being splintered across new and legacy applications) leaves many IT departments overburdened with maintaining a lot of technology and data that’s not being used all that much.

The Ghost of Enterprise Past warns us that IT can’t enable the enterprise’s future if it’s stuck still supporting its past.

 

The Ghost of Enterprise Present

While IT was busy battling the Ghost of Enterprise Past, a familiar, but fainter, specter suddenly became empowered by the diffusion of the consumerization of IT.  The rapid ascent of the cloud and mobility, spirited by service-oriented solutions that were more focused on the user experience, promised to quickly deliver only the functionality required right now to support the speed and agility requirements driving the enterprise’s business needs in the present moment.

Gifted by this New Prometheus, Shadow IT emerged from the shadows as the Ghost of Enterprise Present, with business-driven and decentralized IT solutions becoming more commonplace, as well as begrudgingly accepted by IT leaders.

All of which creates quite the IT Conundrum, forming yet another front in the war against Business-IT collaboration.  Although, in the short-term, the consumerization of IT usually better services the technology needs of the enterprise, in the long-term, if it’s not integrated into a cohesive strategy, it creates a complex web of IT that entangles the enterprise much more than it enables it.

And with the enterprise becoming much more of a conceptual, rather than a physical, entity due to the cloud and mobile devices enabling us to take the enterprise with us wherever we go, the evolution of enterprise security is now facing far more daunting challenges than the external security threats we focused on in the past.  This more open business environment is here to stay, and it requires a modern data security model, despite the fact that such a model could become the weakest link in enterprise security.

The Ghost of Enterprise Present asks many questions, but none more frightening than: Can the enterprise really be secured?

 

The Ghost of Enterprise Future

Of course, the T in IT wasn’t the only apparition previously invisible outside of the IT department to recently break through the veil in a big way.  The I in IT had its own coming-out party this year also since, as many predicted, 2012 was the year of Big Data.

Although neither the I nor the T is magic, instead of sugar plums, Data Psychics and Magic Elephants appear to be dancing in everyone’s heads this holiday season.  In other words, the predictive power of big data and the technological wizardry of Hadoop (as well as other NoSQL techniques) seem to be on the wish list of every enterprise for the foreseeable future.

However, despite its unquestionable potential, as its hype starts to settle down, the sobering realities of big data analytics will begin to sink in.  Data’s value comes from data’s usefulness.  If all we do is hoard data, then we’ll become so lost in the details that we’ll be unable to connect enough of the dots to discover meaningful patterns and convert big data into useful information that enables the enterprise to take action, make better decisions, or otherwise support its business activities.

Big data will force us to revisit information overload as we are occasionally confronted with the limitations of historical analysis, and blindsided by how our biases and preconceptions could silence the signal and amplify the noise, which will also force us to realize that data quality still matters in big data and that bigger data needs better data management.

As the Ghost of Enterprise Future, big data may haunt us with more questions than the many answers it will no doubt provide.

 

“Bah, Humbug!”

I realize that this post lacks the happy ending of A Christmas Carol.  To paraphrase Dickens, I endeavored in this ghostly little post to raise the ghosts of a few ideas, not to put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, or with the season, but simply to give them thoughts to consider about how to keep the Enterprise well in the new year.  Happy Holidays Everyone!

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

 

Related Posts

Why does the sun never set on legacy applications?

Are Applications the La Brea Tar Pits for Data?

The Diffusion of the Consumerization of IT

The Cloud is shifting our Center of Gravity

More Tethered by the Untethered Enterprise?

A Swift Kick in the AAS

The UX Factor

Sometimes all you Need is a Hammer

Shadow IT and the New Prometheus

The IT Consumerization Conundrum

OCDQ Radio - The Evolution of Enterprise Security

The Cloud Security Paradox

The Good, the Bad, and the Secure

The Weakest Link in Enterprise Security

Can the Enterprise really be Secured?

Magic Elephants, Data Psychics, and Invisible Gorillas

Big Data el Memorioso

Information Overload Revisited

The Limitations of Historical Analysis

Data Silence

The Evolution of Enterprise Security

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This podcast episode is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

OCDQ Radio is a vendor-neutral podcast about data quality and its related disciplines, produced and hosted by Jim Harris.

During this episode, Bill Laberis and I discuss the necessary evolution of enterprise security in the era of cloud computing and mobile devices.  Our discussion includes public, private, and hybrid clouds, leveraging existing security best practices, defining BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, mobile device management, and striking a balance between convenience and security.

Bill Laberis is the Editorial Director of the Enterprise CIO Forum, in which capacity he oversees the content of both its US and international websites.  He is also Editorial Director and Social Media Manager in the IDG Custom Solutions Group, working closely with clients to create highly individualized custom content programs that leverage the wide range of media capabilities, including print, online, multimedia, and custom events.

Bill Laberis was editor-in-chief of Computerworld from 1986-1996, has been a frequent speaker and keynoter, and has written for various business publications including The Wall Street Journal.  He has been closely following the IT sector for 30 years.

Can the Enterprise really be Secured?

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This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Over the last two months, I have been blogging a lot about how enterprise security has become an even more important, and more complex, topic of discussion than it already was.  The days of the perimeter fence model being sufficient are long gone, and social media is helping social engineering more effectively attack the weakest links in an otherwise sound security model.

With the consumerization of IT allowing Shadow IT to emerge from the shadows and the cloud and mobile devices enabling the untethering of the enterprise from the physical boundaries that historically defined where the enterprise stopped and the outside world began, I have been more frequently pondering the question: Can the enterprise really be secured?

The cloud presents the conundrum of relying on non-enterprise resources for some aspects of enterprise security.  However, “one advantage of the cloud,” Judy Redman recently blogged, “is that it drives the organization to take a more comprehensive, and effective, approach to risk governance.”  Redman’s post includes four recommended best practices for stronger cloud security.

With the growing popularity of the mobile-app-portal-to-the-cloud business model, more enterprises are embracing mobile app development for deploying services to better support both their customers and their employees.  “Mobile apps,” John Jeremiah recently blogged, “are increasingly dependent on cloud services that the apps team didn’t build, the organization doesn’t own, and the ops team doesn’t even know about.”  Jeremiah’s post includes four things to consider for stronger mobile security.

Although it is essential for every enterprise to have a well-articulated security strategy, “it is important to understand that strategy is not policy,” John Burke recently blogged.  “Security strategy links corporate strategy overall to specific security policies; policies implement strategy.”  Burke’s post includes five concrete steps to take to build a security strategy and implement security policies.

With the very notion of an enterprise increasingly becoming more of a conceptual entity than a physical entity, enterprise security is becoming a bit of a misnomer.  However, the underlying concepts of enterprise security still need to be put into practice, and even more so now that, since the enterprise has no physical boundaries, the enterprise is everywhere, which means that everyone (employees, partners, suppliers, service providers, customers) will have to work together for “the enterprise” to really be secured.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

 

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Enterprise Security and Social Engineering

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This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

“100 percent security no longer exists in the digital world,” Christian Verstraete recently blogged.  “Many companies have to recognize that they have not developed a proactive enough security strategy.  They also have to recognize that they have not put the appropriate procedures in place to cope with a security breach when it happens.  Instead, they are in reactive mode.”

In my previous post, I blogged about how although any proactive security strategy can only be as strong as its weakest link, the weakest link in your enterprise security could actually be the protocols enacted in the event of an apparent security breach.

“We are confronted with a world where employees bring their own devices and use them for both their private and their business lives,” Verstraete continued.  “As our world is getting increasingly integrated, and as social media is used by enterprises to reach their customers and prospects, we need to train our people to ensure they are watchful for social engineering.”

The book Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking by Chris Hadnagy, the lead developer of Social-Engineer.org, defines social engineering as “the act of manipulating a person to take an action that may or may not be in their best interest.”

“While software companies are learning how to strengthen their programs,” Hadnagy explained, “hackers and malicious social engineers are turning to the weakest part of the infrastructure — the people.  The motivation is all about return on investment.  No self-respecting hacker is going to spend 100 hours to get the same results from a simple attack that takes one hour, or less.”

“Denial, ignorance, or the overwhelming nature of threats and vulnerabilities are all causes of a lack of focus,” Ken Larson recently blogged.  “In this age of IT, the threats and vulnerabilities raised by mobility, social networking, cloud computing, and the sharing of IT resources between enterprises must be added to the traditional threats that we’ve focused on for years.”

As I have previously blogged, traditional approaches focus mainly on external security threats, which nowadays is like fortifying your physical barriers while ignoring the cloud floating over them and the mobile devices walking around them.  The more open business environment enabled by cloud and mobile technologies is here to stay, and it requires a modern data security model.

“Proactively define your security strategy,” Verstraete concluded.  “Decide what an acceptable risk level is.  Choose and implement tools and procedures accordingly, and train, train, train your employees.”  I definitely agree that employee training is essential to strengthening your enterprise security, and especially training your employees to understand the principles of social engineering.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

 

Related Posts

The Weakest Link in Enterprise Security

Enterprise Security is on Red Alert

Securing your Digital Fortress

The Good, the Bad, and the Secure

The Data Encryption Keeper

The Cloud Security Paradox

The Cloud is shifting our Center of Gravity

Are Cloud Providers the Bounty Hunters of IT?

The Return of the Dumb Terminal

A Swift Kick in the AAS

Sometimes all you Need is a Hammer

Shadow IT and the New Prometheus