by David Walter – August 19, 2010
Throughout our lives, we all have to make decisions without all the relevant facts. Sometimes our instincts guide us in the right direction, and sometimes we just get lucky. But there are also those decisions that blow up in our faces. For an example, look no further than the thousands of homeowners who purchased their dream homes at the height of the housing boom, only to find themselves in a nightmare scenario months later when the market tanked and they went upside-down in their mortgages.
While we’ll never have a crystal ball that helps us see clearly into the future, we’d all like to have the facts—and just the relevant facts—when we’re faced with an important decision. But in this age of information explosion, it’s a major challenge to sift through the constant influx of data, most of which is completely immaterial. Consider this statistic presented by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: “Every two days now, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” While we may not be able to avoid the barrage of information that floods our minds and our inboxes on a daily basis, we can strive to filter out the excess and make sense of what’s left.
But to do this, we need context.
From a governance, risk and compliance (GRC) perspective, it starts with understanding what’s important to the business:
• What are the business processes that directly support our corporate objectives?
• What people, information and applications support those critical processes?
• And what are the risks to our people, information, applications and processes that may prevent us from achieving our corporate objectives?
Our customers rely on RSA Archer eGRC Solutions to answer these very questions. To put it simply, RSA Archer is a repository of what’s important to people. It helps our customers put risks, threats, incidents and compliance deficiencies into business context so they can prioritize their response and focus on what’s most significant to the organization.
Here’s just one example: Every business has intellectual property that it needs to protect, and this data may be stored and used across the global enterprise. How do you know who should be looking at this information? What movement of the information is safe and appropriate? What do you do if the information is compromised? To answer these questions, you must have business context:
• Who manages the information and who needs to access it?
• What business processes does the data support and what regulations impact the data?
• When is the information accessed?
• Where is the data accessed and where is it moved?
• Why is it necessary to store the information?
Using RSA Archer, organizations can manage a repository of information assets and perform online assessments to determine classification ratings and required retention periods. They can also link information assets to the business processes they support, the applications where they are managed, the facilities where they are housed, and the owners and custodians of the information. Based on these relationships, RSA Archer automatically generates a criticality rating for each information asset.
When a log management or data loss prevention system identifies a potential compromise of sensitive information and those events are passed into RSA Archer, both IT and business users have the context they need to respond appropriately. Events that impact critical information assets will receive prioritized attention, and appropriate users are notified of their responsibilities for issue analysis and remediation.
As a division of EMC, RSA is ideally positioned to deliver value to our customers by providing business context for governance, risk and compliance activities. EMC is renowned for its expertise in collecting data, giving it context, and presenting it to users in a way that’s easy to digest and manage. As we continue to enhance the RSA Archer eGRC Platform capabilities, we’ll maintain our focus on helping customers make sense of complex information, prioritize risks and issues, and allocate resources effectively to protect what is most important to their business.