Ostia Solutions. Data Governance. Contact: Address: 6 The Mill Building, The Maltings, Bray, Co Wicklow

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1 Ostia Solutions Data Governance Contact: Address: 6 The Mill Building, The Maltings, Bray, Co Wicklow Web: Phone:

2 Data Governance So, you wake up one morning and realise you really do work in a regulated industry. How did that happen? This wasn t where you saw your career going at all. However, all is not lost. Being regulated in itself isn t necessarily a bad thing. Over time you can adapt your business process, demonstrate your compliance and accommodate the reporting needs of the regulator. The challenge here is that the regulators, as often as not, are little monkeys with too much time on their hands, so they change the rules every now and again. Your job is to respond rapidly, providing perfect information according to the new criteria in no time at all, as if you always did it that way. If you have collected this data at all, the chances are it is locked away in several systems. Portus gives you the means to amalgamate compliance data into one, easily presented model or report. It becomes a simple matter of identifying the locations from which it must be extracted, deciding upon the layout of the final presentation and then selecting the golf course you re going to take on that afternoon. Data Governance - A Technical Overview The management and control of data has been a key part of the IT landscape for many years. For many organisations in all sectors, their data has represented one of the most valuable assets that they have. There has always been a requirement to secure the data from improper use, to control and understand who is using data, and with the explosion of data in the past years, to actually understand what is out there. This control of data has now become known as Data Governance. While previously there were good business and technical reasons for controlling how data is used, in recent times, there has been mountains of legislation passed all over the world related to data governance. This has now placed an onus on organisations to comply from a legal perspective with legislation in relation to their data. In former years, organisations had quite straightforward IT structures with perhaps a large mainframe where all the data resided and where the applications ran. This has now been transformed in the sense that not only has much data has been replicated, but is also in use in many disparate environments and on different devices leading to a much greater management or governance problem for the data. The key technical issue with managing this data is that the data is now on multiple and differing platforms and in multiple different database technologies. Organisations are being challenged to not only provide centralised control of data but to have an understanding about what data is out there and how it is being used, why it is being used and who is using it.

3 The Portus technology has the ability to help in a number of ways to resolve these issues: Consider a standard audit situation. In many cases an auditor will want to understand what data is available and to see specific samples of the data to ensure the audit correctly reviews what is going on within an organisation. This will normally require an IT professional to spend perhaps weeks of work getting the information for the auditor and also delaying the completion of the audit. Portus provides the possibility for the auditor to do the research themselves and in real time subject to the appropriate security permissions being granted. The auditor using Portus can determine what sort of data is there and to look at the contents of any data. Portus has a comprehensive logging mechanism for any data access made through the Portus technology. Regardless of the technology where the data is held, Portus can produce real time logs of access to resources in a standard way and in the sequence in which the access occurred regardless of the back end technologies. This logging can be at a high level revealing who accesses what resources, when and from where down to logging the actual request that the user issued and the data that was returned to the user. This can provide comprehensive auditing facilities of access to data which can be retained and searched for as far back as is necessary. Portus provides an ability to get data into a database very simply and with no installation on a client machine. Consider the amount of information that is held today on PCs about which an organisation has little or no knowledge. For example, it is quite clear that there are huge amounts of corporate data held in Excel spreadsheets on PCs around the world. Portus provides the ability for the data in these Excel spreadsheets to be extracted to and reused from a central data repository in the organisation. This not only enables an organisation to understand what data is out there but to ensure that a central copy of the data is always maintained.

4 So consider the impact this could have on your organisation: Auditors requiring access to data could do so real time reducing the audit time by weeks or even months thus resulting in time savings and cost savings as less time is required. Consider the benefits of a centrally located and standard set of logs of access to your back office resources. This can provide visibility of who is requesting what, from where and what time of day to determine if these accesses are legitimate. As these logs are in a standard format regardless of the system being accessed, they can be trawled by robots on a regular basis to look for irregular patterns of access to specific types of data. Ever wondered what data is out there in your organisation in Excel spreadsheets? Ever come across a situation where a shared spreadsheet gets out of sync so people are dealing with different data? This can be addressed using the Portus technology to ensure that data from Excel (or other technologies) is stored and shared from central resources rather than on individual PCs. In general terms, to implement the above data governance solutions with Portus, the following is required: The Portus server is installed on the system or systems where the data resides. Services are then created based on existing data or new data that may be required (e.g. for the Excel solution) in the Portus server on the various systems. These services may then be used for access to data when standardised logging of access is required. These services can also be used by auditors who need to look at the data available. Finally if Excel governance is required, a small Excel macro must be installed in the system to control the Excel data that is to be managed.

5 About Ostia Solutions Ostia Solutions is a growing, friendly, talented, independent, platform agnostic technology company. We specialise in the rapid extraction of information from any number of sources, systems or databases so it may be combined and presented at the point of consumption. What does that mean? It means we provide the how to business people who have become infuriated by the barriers inherent in their technology infrastructure preventing them delivering hard-toreach but vital, real-time information to the points where it is most needed. Our growing Ostia team comprises a group of professionals who represent a wealth of technology and business impressive skills, outstanding experience and wide ranging expertise. Between us we have over 350 years of industry experience, and we are adding to this through recruitment and attracting individuals with special talent to enhance the company s capabilities and future reach. The core technology team has seen the birth and development of Portus underlying technology over many years, and Ostia is proud to have secured the services and commitments of this outstanding team. For further information please contact: info@ostiasolutions.com Address: 6 The Mill Building, The Maltings, Bray, Co Wicklow Web: Phone: