Data is like Water

When I go into companies and help them with data inventory and/or data classification it is sometimes hard for people to understand the WHY around this. It’s kind of like children “WHY are we doing this?” or “We’ve never done this before, WHY are we doing it now?” So the best example that I’ve come up with to help people understand WHY it’s important is this.

Almost all of us have cleaned up a water spill or unfortunately, some of us have had to file an insurance claim because of water damage. Water goes everywhere. It goes in and under and through whatever is in its path. There is no stopping it and there is no telling where it went. The same thing is true about data.

Companies struggle with Shadow IT in all corners of their business. They have users who use applications for purposes they were not intended for and anything can be emailed away or saved to DropBox and we rarely know. We try to encrypt it or lock it up on a server but eventually, most of it finds its way out because people have access to it.

So once it is - out - where did it go? For Shadow IT, we generally don’t even know about it. For authorized collection, processing, and storage of data, once it has left the safety of our environment we no longer have any control of it. It goes to person X’s inbox and they save it to their personal hard drive and then share it with person Y who posts it on their company server and then person Z gets it, leaves the company and now it is on Pluto.

Data is like water.