December 29, 2010 – In the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal, organizations are realizing the need to protect their data. With the digital collaboration and technology in organizations today, data is more widespread and certainly more vulnerable than ever before.

BusinessWire brought this news to our attention in their article, “Working to Prevent Being the Next WikiLeak? Don’t Forget the Metadata.” Securing that data will require ensuring they have processes and automation in place for authorization and review of access to data, monitoring who is using data, and identifying sensitive data that is at risk. The relevance of data is constantly changing and that poses additional challenges. When it comes to identifying sensitive data, and protecting access to it, a number of types of metadata are relevant: user and group information, permissions information, access activity, and sensitive content indicators. A key benefit to leveraging metadata for preventing data loss is that it can be used to focus and accelerate the data classification process. In many instances, the ability to leverage metadata can speed up the process by up to 90 percent.

Using manual methods to secure data is not the answer. The intelligent use of metadata and data governance automation is the right technology for this project. Be sure you choose the right product and partner to capture and index data. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies that can help clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies and indexing rule bases. 

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.