Sunday, January 22

Access Governance Continuum

I've been pretty focused recently on Access Governance and specifically how large organizations can get their arms around the problem of access as it relates to unstructured data (mostly file systems and SharePoint). Most of the people I speak to who have responsibility for answering the related tough questions are simply overwhelmed by the sheer size and complexity of the challenge.

It led me to consider that there are a different set of tasks I'd recommend to those people than I might to someone who has a somewhat more mature access governance program. So, I started documenting an Access Governance Continuum; a maturity model of sorts that discusses how to tell where you stand and what the ideal next steps might be. A whitepaper is in the works, but essentially it looks something like this:

Confused > Planning > Cleaning > Maintaining

To illustrate a few examples:

In the Confused stage, you might want to run scans to identify open file shares. In the Planning stage, you'd be identifying data owners / custodians for those shares. In the Cleaning phase, you'd be working to clean up trouble spots and diving deeper based on what you've found. And in the Maintenance stage, you'd be automating some of the cleanup based on business rules.

This is all based on real-world projects, what has worked for the world's largest organizations, and how that knowledge translates to a mid-market need for pragmatic solutions.

...more to come.