Inside the FDCCI: Risk Management

Project managers assigned to FDCCI efforts need to assess and move data stored in more than 3,000 data centers. There is an overabundance of structured and unstructured data that not only depletes storage capacity, but also requires significant expenditures to manage and secure. They need an efficient way to secure and condense data for both onsite and cloud storage. A look at practical solutions immediately available to federal agencies shows that much of the data can easily be reduced without compromising security.

Risk Management

While examining data centers for duplication and wasteful practices, the federal government’s risk associated with the billions of records housed across thousands of data centers increases exponentially. Records include taxpayer Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Private Health Information (PHI) and other data covered by government mandates and industry regulations. IT operations must safeguard sensitive data at every stage of a project —both structured and unstructured, in motion, at rest and across multiple operating systems. Any breach risks disruption of daily operations and future development by audit interference, or worse yet, having funding reduced, delayed, or even withheld by the Government Accountability Office for noncompliance. To ensure data integrity, security recommendations span encryption and digital signature capabilities, including AES and 3DES passphrase or certificate-based encryption, and signature authentication support. Use of file name encryption guarantees no sensitive information is exposed without the appropriate passphrase or digital certificate, and automatic ‘shredding’ of electronic files to the DOD 5220 standard ensures deleted original clear text copies of files are not recoverable.

Persistent, file level, data-centric security renders data unusable to anyone that does not have the key to decrypt it, even in the cloud or if lost or stolen. It protects data transfers to and from the cloud regardless if the networks are cellular, Wi-Fi, public or shared.

Addressing the Three Critical Aspects of Data Center Management

Over the last three blog posts we've examined at three critical aspects of data center management. The success of any data center consolidation effort is clearly vulnerable to the competing pressures of Cost Management, Service Delivery and Risk Management requirements. Exploring one approach that address all three critical aspects has shown how combining compression with data-centric strong encryption vastly diminishes that pressure. Only data-centric security guarantees protection independent of operating system, application and data format while at rest or in motion. What’s more, compression for efficient file transfer and storage reduction translates immediately to benefits and value for the cloud.