The challenge was to manage explosive data growth and gain clear data visibility to reduce data footprint while complying with security regulations.

Managing explosive data growth by introducing automated data governance

With limited IT funds, it made the decision to store a significant percentage of it its production data on a single network attached storage (NAS) device. The county’s Director of Information Technology Services explains more: “Over the years, we’ve seen a data explosion in line with our county’s population growth. We now have many terabytes of unstructured data captured in over 150 million files. We didn’t have any automated data management processes in place, and our staff is just not equipped to keep track of the data being stored by all county employees. This means we had little visibility into the age and value of our data. As a government organization, it is vital to get a clear handle on where our data resides and who has access to it so that we can start to apply structured data governance rules.”

The county is a long-term user of NetIQ Identity Manager and Identity Governance to manage its user provisioning and access processes, so it made sense to look to NetIQ for this particular challenge. OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) recognizes the risks inherent in storing unstructured data and has developed industry-leading solutions for identifying what data organizations store, where it is housed, and who has access to it. With an automated means of remediating access permissions, moving data, and even disposing of it as specified by regulations or policies, NetIQ Data Access Governance (DAG) consists of a set of integrated products with proven technology.

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