IBM Forms Data Governance Council

HostReview.com
Friday, July 1, 2005; 01:15 PM

IBM (www.ibm.com) today announced it has formed the Data Governance Council with dozens of leading companies, institutions and technology solution providers -- in a global effort to develop a 'blueprint' of common solutions which go beyond traditional monikers of security, privacy, compliance, and operational risk to form a new category for businesses called Data Governance.

Data Governance is the process by which companies govern appropriate access to their critical data, by measuring operational risk and mitigating security exposures associated with access to data.

The Data Governance Council will look to redefine the management of data governance policy, the impact of policy on business processes and practices, and the enforcement of policy in IT infrastructure, content and organizational behavior.

The council is developing a blueprint for the governance and protection of personal and organizational data within and between enterprises, and is evaluating how organizations can implement this data governance blueprint using IBM and business partner solutions and research concepts.

Companies today have difficulty measuring the value of their data, including the types and probability of risks around data loss, and have no standard way to mitigate these risks.

"Increasingly, companies are seeing alarming rates of data theft. We need a better approach to overseeing appropriate access to critical information at all levels to help minimize this threat," said Robert Garigue, chief information security officer, Bank of Montreal.

"One of the biggest problems for organizations is how to manage and control all the data that resides within a company these days, especially as more and more companies do business with each other online, extending into large data supply chains," said Steven Adler, chair of the Data Governance Council and program director, IBM Data Governance Solutions.