It is high time that organisations minimise risks associated with offline data-driven processes.
Many people still download data onto their PC, laptop, or other offline location in order to analyse it (usually in Excel). Even in enterprise environments where all kinds of managed analytics and reporting tools are in use, these tools still have limitations – such as being able to combine data from multiple sources. As a result, analysts and power users often bypass managed analytics environments and use the offline platform of their choice.
This creates a new issue: one of security and compliance. Once data is taken offline, organisational control and audit trails are lost. The data is susceptible to leak or breach, due to a lack of traceability and authorisation.
What, then, is the solution?
In this short video, our CEO Zachary Zeus is joined by Vice President and Managing Director of Hitachi Vantara AU&NZ, Nathan McGregor, to share insights on enabling productive and effective analytics – whilst maintaining security and compliance.
Nathan
Hi there. Nathan McGregor here, Managing Director and Vice President of Hitachi Vantara Australia & New Zealand. I’m joined here today by CEO of Bizcubed Zach Zeus who has been servicing the Australia/New Zealand marketplace with Pentaho for more than years. That’s the Hitachi analytics platform. Welcome, Zach.
Zach
Thanks, Nathan.
Nathan
You and I have had a bit of a discussion in the series around analytics and sharing some of our understanding of the market and the trends. Last time though you talked about something I think I’d like to dig in a bit more today. Which was the concept that people are still out there in modern enterprise environments today who may still be downloading data offline. Offloading that from their existing platform to do analytics to then turn it back into a business outcome and doing that outside of the normal systems and processes. That to me sounds a terribly risky outcome in this hardly compliant world that we’re in today.
Zach
Yeah, and it is. And risky is the way to talk about it. What the risk that it creates is the risk of a data breach. If people are taking data offline, you no longer have control over it. You don’t know where it’s gonna land up. There’s not the traceability or the authorization. You don’t know who’s seeing it or for what purposes. All of these create issues for the modern organization. We’re surprised how frequently we see analytics and information and business process being driven by these offline data processes. Now the reason organizations and people within these organizations do that is because they need to deliver business outcomes. And they are focused on delivering those business outcomes and they balance the risks, they discount the risks significantly, because they’re trying to achieve the outcomes.
Nathan
And that makes perfect sense for sure.
Zach
Yep
Nathan
I guess though in analytics in these environments it’s a very complicated marketplace right. It’s such a big ecosystem of it. How can we play a part to delivering that need for them?
Zach
Yeah. The big thing that organizations need is tooling that allows them to stay in the ecosystem, stay online and connect to information and manage that effectively and enable those analysts to deliver those business outcomes, enable the business to achieve those high-value analytics outcomes while maintaining that security and traceability and audit ability. And that’s where the Pentaho platform and the fact that it’s open and connects to anything really plays a major role.
Nathan
Okay. That’s great. So effectively you’re providing all businesses with the opportunity to extract the great value they have in their business data to make key business decisions. But do that in such a way that they can be highly compliant.
Zach
That’s right. Absolutely.
Nathan
So how will someone know if they’re in that current situation and they need your help?
Zach
If they have analysts downloading data and massaging them in Excel or other offline tools they have that problem and we can help.
Nathan
Okay. They need to start looking into that then. Thanks very much for that today Zach.
Zach
Thanks, Nathan.
Zachary Zeus
Zachary Zeus is the Co-CEO & Founder of BizCubed. He provides the business with more than 20 years' engineering experience and a solid background in providing large financial services with data capability. He maintains a passion for providing engineering solutions to real world problems, lending his considerable experience to enabling people to make better data driven decisions.