With the recent data breach at OPM, the spotlight has firmly been on federal data breaches and the vulnerabilities that expose sensitive employee and citizen information to would-be hackers.

Public sector organizations face more data challenges today than ever before. As discovered via research performed by North Highland Consulting, the top issues government organizations face include:

“Dark data” – by that we mean data that’s been stored away in some IT system and untouched for years, is about to come out of the shadows.

Thanks to big data technologies it’s become easier than ever to extract new business value from information assets that haven been collected, processed and stored away (either because they’d served their purpose or were required to be kept for compliance reasons).

Not using, analyzing, or even accessing that data not only inflates storage costs, it could also leave that data vulnerable to the mismanagement of sensitive data.

How to utilize multiple data streams and multiplexing with Veritas NetBackup
 

Since the time of my last blog on tuning NetBackup, there have been several advances on how to utilize cloud storage in your overall data protection strategy.

Running a large organization, private or public sector, requires a lot of IT and as technology has changed and matured data centers have exploded in number and size.

As data centers grow in operational costs in a climate of shrinking IT budgets, efficiencies are being sought out in all areas; from people to support the equipment, the real estate that equipment occupies in the data center, to the power needed to both run the servers and to cool the building.

In today’s data intense environments, business and government agencies collect unprecedented amounts of data. It’s estimated that more than 50% of this data can be classified as confidential.  This sensitive, personal, financial, and health information is protected by several industry and governmental data privacy regulations, such as HIPPAA, PCI DSS, GLBA, and European Privacy Laws. Failure to keep this data secure can impact your organization immensely.

I had the pleasure of moderating a panel session last week at Symantec’s Annual Government Symposium titled “Data Governance: Foundation for IT Success.” Panelists included Doug Matthews, Vice President of Information Availability Products for Veritas; Damon Davis, Director for the Health Data Initiative, Department of Health and Human Services; and Ryan Swann, Director of Data Analytics

The Informatica Government Summit is fast approaching! As a platinum sponsor, we look forward to seeing you in Washington DC on April 23, 2015 for this complimentary event!

Bloomberg Analyst, Kevin Brancato, Director for Government Research, will deliver a keynote presentation, “Enterprise Data Management: A View From Above” which will discuss the importance of creating an enterprise data management strategy to combat the challenges of extracting value from your data.

So you’ve got all sorts of endpoint controls and continuous monitoring solutions in place across your agency’s IT environment. Great! Sounds like you’ve got a good security posture going on.

But is your data actually as secure as you think it is? Unfortunately, not.

If there’s one thing that cyberattacks on government systems have taught us in the past few years is that the biggest threat doesn’t come from rogue hackers or nations, it comes from within.

Weeding out fraud is a big priority for the public sector. From unpaid and fraudulent taxes to benefit fraud, governments are turning to data to hit back.