Tag Archives: data compliance

Nurturing Data Governance for Cybersecurity and AI

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Towards the middle of the 2000s, I started getting my exposure in Data Governance. This began as I was studying and practising to be certified as an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) circa 2002-2003. My understanding of the value of data and databases in the storage world, now better known as data infrastructure, grew and expanded quickly. I never gotten my OCP certification because I ran out of money investing in the 5 required classes that included PL/SQL, DBA Admin I and II, and Performance Tuning. My son, Jeffrey was born in 2002, and money was tight.

The sentiment of data governance of most organizations I have engaged with at that time, and over the next course of almost 18 years or so, pre-Covid, the practice of data governance was to comply to some regulatory requirements. 

All that is changing. Early 2024, NIST released the second version of their Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). CSF 2.0 placed Data Governance in the center of the previous 5 pillars of CSF 1.1. The diagram below shows the difference between the versions.

High level change of Cybersecurity Framework 1.1 to 2.0.

Ripples like this in my data management radar are significant, noticeable and important to me. I blogged about it in my April 2024 blog “NIST CSF 2.0 brings Data Governance into the Light“.

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Beyond the WORM with MinIO object storage

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I find the terminology of WORM (Write Once Read Many) coming back into the IT speak in recent years. In the era of rip and burn, WORM was a natural thing where many of us “youngsters” used to copy files to a blank CD or DVD. I got know about how WORM worked when I learned that the laser in the CD burning process alters the chemical compound in a segment on the plastic disc of the CD, rendering the “burned” segment unwritable once it was written but it could be read many times.

At the enterprise level, I got to know about WORM while working with tape drives and tape libraries in the mid-90s. The objective of WORM is to save and archive the data and files in a non-rewritable format for compliance reasons. And it was the data compliance and data protection parts that got me interested into data management. WORM is a big deal in many heavily regulated industries such as finance and banking, insurance, oil and gas, transportation and more.

Obviously things have changed. WORM, while very much alive in the ageless tape industry, has another up-and-coming medium in Object Storage. The new generation of data infrastructure and data management specialists are starting to take notice.

Worm Storage – Image from Hubstor (https://www.hubstor.net/blog/write-read-many-worm-compliant-storage/)

I take this opportunity to take MinIO object storage for a spin in creating WORM buckets which can be easily architected as data compliance repositories with many applications across regulated industries. Here are some relevant steps.

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The other pandemic – Datanemic

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It is a disaster. No matter what we do, the leaks and the cracks are appearing faster than we are fixing it. It is a global pandemic.

I am not talking about COVID-19, the pandemic that has affected our lives and livelihood for over a year. I am talking about the other pandemic – the compromise of security of data.

In the past 6 months, the data leaks, the security hacks, the ransomware scourge have been more devastating than ever. Here are a few big ones that happened on a global scale:

Data Security Breach, Cyber Attack, Ransomware

Closer to home, here in South East Asia, we have

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Falconstor Software Defined Data Preservation for the Next Generation

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Falconstor® Software is gaining momentum. Given its arduous climb back to the fore, it is beginning to soar again.

Tape technology and Digital Data Preservation

I mentioned that long term digital data preservation is a segment within the data lifecycle which has merits and prominence. SNIA® has proved that this is a strong growing market segment through its 2007 and 2017 “100 Year Archive” surveys, respectively. 3 critical challenges of this long, long-term digital data preservation is to keep the archives

  • Accessible
  • Undamaged
  • Usable

For the longest time, tape technology has been the king of the hill for digital data preservation. The technology is cheap, mature, and many enterprises has built their long term strategy around it. And the pulse in the tape technology market is still very healthy.

The challenges of tape remain. Every 5 years or so, companies have to consider moving the data on the existing tape technology to the next generation. It is widely known that LTO can read tapes of the previous 2 generations, and write to it a generation before. The tape transcription process of migrating digital data for the sake of data preservation is bad because it affects the structural integrity and quality of the content of the data.

In my times covering the Oil & Gas subsurface data management, I have seen NOCs (national oil companies) with 500,000 tapes of all generations, from 1/2″ to DDS, DAT to SDLT, 3590 to LTO 1-7. And millions are spent to transcribe these tapes every few years and we have folks like Katalyst DM, Troika and more hovering this landscape for their fill.

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The Falcon to soar again

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One of the historical feats which had me mesmerized for a long time was the 14-year journey China’s imperial treasures took to escape the Japanese invasion in the early 1930s, sandwiched between rebellions and civil wars in China. More than 20,000 pieces of the imperial treasures took a perilous journey to the west and back again. Divided into 3 routes over a decade and four years, not a single piece of treasure was broken or lost. All in the name of preservation.

Today, that 20,000 over pieces live in perpetuity in 2 palaces – Beijing Palace Museum in China and National Palace Museum Taipei in Taiwan

Digital data preservation

Digital data preservation is on another end of the data lifecycle spectrum. More often than not, it is not the part that many pay attention to. In the past 2 decades, digital data has grown so much that it is now paramount to keep the data forever. Mind you, this is not the data hoarding kind but to preserve the knowledge and wisdom which is in the digital content of the data.

[ Note: If you are interested to know more about Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom, check out my 2015 article on LinkedIn ]

SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) conducted 2 surveys – one in 2007 and another in 2017 – called the 100 Year Archive, and found that the requirement for preserving digital data has grown multiple folds over the 10 years. In the end, the final goal is to ensure that the perpetual digital contents are

  • Accessible
  • Undamaged
  • Usable

All at an affordable cost. Therefore, SNIA has the vision that the digital content must transcend beyond the storage medium, the storage system and the technology that holds it.

The Falcon reemerges

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to speak with Falconstor® Software‘s David Morris (VP of Global Product Strategy & Marketing) and Mark Delsman (CTO). It was my first engagement with Falconstor® in almost 9 years! I wrote a piece of Falconstor® in my blog in 2011.

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Data Renaissance in Oil and Gas

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The Oil and Gas industry, especially in the upstream Exploration and Production (EP) sector, has been enjoying a renewed vigour in the past few years. I have kept in touch with the developments of the EP side because I always have a soft spot for the industry. I have engaged in infrastructure and solutions in the petrotechnical side in my days at Sun Microsystems back in the late 90s. The engagements with EP intensified in my first stint at NetApp, wearing the regional Oil & Gas consulting engineer here in South Asia for almost 6 years. Then, with Interica in 2014, I was dealing with subsurface data and seismic interpretation technology. EP is certainly an exciting sector to cover because there are so much technical work involved and the technologies, especially the non-IT, are breath taking.

I have been an annual registrant to the Digital Energy Journal events since 2013, except last year, and I have always enjoyed their newsletter. This week I attended Digital Energy 2-day conference again, and I was taken in by the exciting times in EP. Here are a few of my views and trends observation in this data renaissance.

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Storage and Data Management Planning crucial for Malaysian SMBs

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Hybrid IT for 2019 and beyond

2019 is here.

I am especially buoyed by the strong network storage industry footing in 2018, reported by The Register last week. 2018 was certainly a blowout year for storage infrastructure and storage software, both for on-premises and the cloud computing platforms. The AWS Outposts announcement over a month ago also just affirmed that the new world is Hybrid IT. And there is plenty to look forward to in 2019.

Malaysian Economic Doldrums

Things are not as rosy for the Malaysia economy in 2019. It will be a challenging 2019 as reported by the Edge, a local business publication. The GDP (gross domestic product) of the first half of 2018 shrunk, from 5.9% in 2017, to 4.65%, and it is estimated to be 4.9% in 2019. With an inexperienced new government, a weak currency, and more competitive economies emerging in ASEAN, Malaysia small and medium businesses (SMBs) could be challenged.

The knee jerk reaction would be to cut the IT spending and revert to buying on price. This has happened too often, because there are always other operating costs that may be more pressing. Furthermore, many of the SMBs are still aimless when it comes to transforming their businesses into the digital data era, groping in the dark and sputtering to get its worth with their IT investments. Often, many are misinformed and stumbled, resulting in much higher wastage and costs.

There is a local saying here:

“Good thing No Cheap; Cheap thing No Good“

And the saying is very apt to describe that there is value in investing well, and the price factor should not always be the main determinant criteria of buying IT infrastructure, software and services.

Many of these SMBs also lack experienced IT staff to manage their IT environment. There is also a hurried urgency to modernize IT, because a well-planned and executed IT strategy and operations would definitely increase their Competitive Advantage. Continue reading →

Let there be light with Commvault Activate

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[Preamble: I have been invited by Commvault via GestaltIT as a delegate to their Commvault GO conference from Oct 9-11, 2018 in Nashville, TN, USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid by Commvault, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Nobody sees well in the dark.

I am piqued and I want to know more about Commvault Activate. The conversation started after lunch yesterday as the delegates were walking back to the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center. I was walking next to Patrick McGrath, one of Commvault marketing folks, and we struck up a conversation in the warm breeze. Patrick started sharing a bit of Commvault Activate and what it could do and the possibilities of many relevant business cases for the solution.

There was a dejà vu moment, bringing my thoughts back to mid-2009. I was just invited by a friend to join him to restructure his company, Real Data Matrix (RDM). They were a NetApp distributor, then Platinum reseller in the early and mid-2000s and they had fell into hard times. Most of their technical team had left them, putting them in a spot to retain one of the largest NetApp support contract in Malaysia at the time.

I wanted to expand on their NetApp DNA and I started to seek out complementary solutions to build on that DNA. Coming out of my gig at EMC, there was an interesting solution which tickled my fancy – VisualSRM. So, I went about seeking the most comprehensive SRM (storage resource management) solution for RDM, one which has the widest storage platforms support. I found Tek-Tools Software and I moved that RDM sign up as their reseller. We got their SE/Developer, Aravind Kurapati, from India to train the RDM engineers. We were ready to hit the market late-2009/early-2010 but a few weeks later, Tek-Tools was acquired by Solarwinds.

Long story short, my mindset about SRM was “If you can’t see your storage resource, you can’t manage your storage“.  Resource visibility is so important in SRM, and the same philosophy applies to Data as well. That’s where Commvault Activate comes in. More than ever, Data Insights is already the biggest differentiator in the Data-Driven transformation in any modern business today. Commvault Activate is the Data Insights that shines the light to all the data in every organization.

After that casual chat with Patrick, more details came up in the early access to Commvault embargoed announcements later that afternoon. Commvault Activate announcement came up in my Twitter feed.

Commvault Activate has a powerful dynamic Index Engine called the Commvault 4D Index and it is responsible to search, discover and learn about different types of data, data context and relationships within the organization. I picked up more information as the conference progressed and found out that the technology behind the Commvault Activate is based on the Apache Lucene Solr enterprise search and indexing platform, courtesy of Lucidworks‘ technology. Suddenly I had a recall moment. I had posted the Commvault and Lucidworks partnership a few months back in my SNIA Malaysia Facebook community. The pictures connected. You can read about the news of the partnership here at Forbes.

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