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Strengthen your data control strategies for the future. 

Everyone thinks about their personal data these days. You think about it. Your customers think about it. Who has it? What are they doing with it? Is it secure? 

These are questions nobody had to ask a few decades ago. Now, data is ubiquitous. It is currency. It’s the oil flowing through the information pipeline, greasing the friction in a transactional economy — on-demand content, virtual healthcare, fintech payment solutions, personalized experiences. It’s the lifeblood of the AI and machine-learning platforms we’re counting on to build our tomorrows. 

Within the technology industry, there is a fundamental concept behind all the data that answers the questions of access, availability, and security. We call it data control. Without it, we’re building a house of cards that will collapse on itself at the first breeze of negligence, criminal intent, or human error. Data control allows us to trust the entire concept of a data-driven digital world. Its importance cannot be understated, which leads us to another critical question: Do you have a data control strategy? 

What is data control?

Data control is the collection of policies and procedures that oversee an organization’s information. It’s less about fixing technical problems and more about inspecting, validating, and documenting the proper oversight of data management.

Data control is about power — power over the data you possess. If you convincingly wield that power, your customers trust you, and your data resources grow. Today, that’s a direct correlation to wealth. Data is a fundamental asset in the digital economy. 

We can understand data control through three primary lenses:

Data Access

What is the exposure of the data you possess? How many users (and which ones) can access it? What systems and third-party integrations have visibility of that data? The question of access also necessitates an understanding of portability — your ability to move that data from one system to another without loss or additional exposure. 

Data Security

How do you protect your data? Not just from cybercriminals or ransomware but also from malicious misuse, negligence, or human error. If you store your data in the cloud, you have entrusted your chosen provider with much of your security. If you decide to keep it on-premises, you’ve assumed an immense responsibility in terms of physical hardware and network infrastructure. Either way, you need to understand the vulnerabilities you’ve accepted and the assurances you’ve incorporated as mitigation.

Data Privacy

Who is using your company's data, and what are the protocols for managing it? Beyond just accessing the data, privacy speaks to the heart of regulatory compliance. It’s about ensuring that everyone you’ve given access to specific data understands the responsibilities therein. This is the most customer-facing factor of data control, but it’s ultimately downstream from the other considerations of access and security. 

Together, these three lenses provide a holistic view of your data control. That said, it’s not a static, set-it-and-forget-it problem. It’s a dynamic business risk that you must actively manage 24/7. You will find yourself constantly balancing compliance auditability, business agility, and risk awareness. 

As your technology landscape evolves amid the surge of post-pandemic digital transformation, your variables for each of these data control concepts will also change dramatically. 

In some ways, data control is less an IT policy and more a philosophical puzzle that your leadership team must never lose sight of in the midst of any number of more pressing challenges and imperatives. 

Practical Data Control Considerations

    • How is data monitored as it moves from user systems to applications and storage devices?
    • How is sensitive data identified and isolated for escalated security?
    • How are data loss and data flaws detected and remediated before they impact functionality or create risk exposure?

Shift the balance of power in the fight against ransomware.

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A different (and better) approach to data control

In most cases, data control falls squarely on the shoulders of IT leadership and C-suite executives. Determining audit compliance, regulatory expectations, and IT systems capabilities requires a massive investment in time and energy. 

Even if you outsource much of your data management to third-party partners, you still have a significant burden in risk assessment and due diligence. For every partner you add to your technology stack, you’re also adding a data control variable that must be understood, managed, and monitored. At the end of the day, what happens to your valuable customer data lies solely with you, not your partners. 

What if you had a data management solution that understands data control and builds access management, governance, security, privacy, and analytics directly into its system?

There’s one solution that does exactly that. Panzura. We are not data storage; we are a data platform. We make your data easier to access, immutably secure, and inherently visible to your policies and procedures. The fundamentals of data control are woven into our very ethos. 

Data Access

Panzura’s award-winning CloudFS global file system gives you the ability to access any file from anywhere at any time. It’s faster, cheaper, more secure, and far more intelligent than anything else. We make you more productive by consolidating data from multiple locations into a single authoritative data source that’s deduplicated, compressed, and protected against ransomware.

Our CloudFS Global File System dynamically coordinates where files are stored, what gets sent to the cloud, who has edit and access rights, which files are cached locally, and how data is managed.

Because we understand the difficulty of managing file access and permissions, especially with slow transfer speeds across legacy network infrastructure, we’ve created a globally-accessible data set optimized for performance. Our hybrid cloud NAS leverages the cloud for the single source of truth while ensuring secure global access throughout the enterprise. 

On top of this dynamic storage solution, we offer a single SaaS dashboard that gives you complete governance control. With real-time metadata access from a unified management view, you’ll have complete visibility into your data access protocols and policies. 

Furthermore, because we take data governance so seriously, our robust audit capabilities are designed to empower quick and efficient tracking of your data. Powerful query and filtering capabilities let you track every action taken on your files and identify who did what and when. Search by date, user, and even file age (to name a few) for the view you need.

Data Security

We set the security bar high — and then rise above it. Far above. CloudFS meets even the most exacting requirements for data availability, usability, security, and compliance at scale.

With Panzura, nothing is really ever gone. Immutable data protection means cyberattacks don’t damage files in the Panzura global file system. The system quickly reverts to previous file versions via immutable data captured by snapshots as if the attack had never happened. 

Even accidents no longer matter. Our Data Services dashboard allows you to find deleted, moved, or renamed files instantly and restore them to their original state with just one click. Your data will always be available. Always secure. Always under your control. 

Data Privacy

We deduplicate and compress your data and use military-grade encryption for efficient and secure file storage to meet cost and compliance requirements. And yet, there’s never a need to re-provision file access permissions for any users. Edge Access will recognize and honor the SMB file share permissions already configured on your Panzura CloudFS. 

Visualize where sensitive data is stored, over-exposed, and at risk of compromise to malicious actors like insider threats, malware, or ransomware. Quickly pinpoint exposed folders, stale data, or inactive accounts that are still enabled.

Just as importantly, you can control data access at a granular level and safely automate permission changes, ensuring users only have access to the data they need, reducing overexposure and other potential risks.

Across all of these capabilities, we incorporate FIPS 140-2 certified and 256-bit military-grade encryption, secure erase, and other critical security features to ensure compliance. Every file action taken by every user is visible in your data services audit.