Open Enterprise Server provides a platform to save and collaborate on user data through an heterogeneous, hybrid, and distributed storage system, NSS. The data stored can contain information of high value and sensitive data like PII, PCI, PHI, etc. With increasing numbers of data breaches for organizations around the world, information security and data privacy are rapidly growing priorities. The need for addressing these has increased with the creation of global regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and more.

The journey to a secure and regulatory compliant deployment begins with identifying sensitive data across new and legacy data sets whether on premise or in the cloud. Businesses today operate in different geo locations and hence it is essential to adhere to the evolving regulations in more than one jurisdiction. Gartner research says, implementing regulatory requirements is an opportunity for an organization to acquire flexible rights to use and share data while maximizing business value[i]. A regulatory compliant business can increase trust between their organization and data subjects (e.g. customers of an insurance company).

Furthermore, Gartner predicts that between now and 2024 enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object[ii]. The rapid growth in data resulting from digital transformation makes it more important than ever to provide the ability to utilize analytics.

Data Discovery is a SaaS-based File Analysis Suite from Micro Focus for organizations who want to quickly find, protect, and secure sensitive and high value data whether it is on-premise or in the cloud. The integration between Open Enterprise Server and Data Discovery provides following capabilities:

1. Data Discovery’s cloud-based micro-service model ensures on-demand scaling and reduced total cost of compliance.
2. Discover and analyze files stored on NSS storage over an SMB channel inherently catering to distributed and hybrid cloud deployments
3. Rich pre-built grammars help in identifying files containing geo specific sensitive data such as PII, PCI, PHI. In addition, custom grammar allows enriching data using regular expressions.
4. Create and collaborate around sensitive data within workspaces to conduct deeper analysis. The pre-built workspace templates cater to data subject analysis (DSAR).
5. Take remediation actions to selected sensitive data files without the need to move or copy data from NSS volume (e.g. collect, delete)

We can break down the data analysis of files on NSS volumes in to following steps:

Identify

Hybrid file analysis capabilities allows for data to be analyzed in the cloud while the source data on NSS volumes can reside on-premise or in CIS backed cloud storage.

Analyze

The pre-defined regular-expression based grammars allow for automated tagging and metadata enrichment of sensitive files indexed in the previous step. The contextual aware grammar enforcement limits the number of false positives. For instance, the engine ensures that the matching number is a passport number by enforcing additional validations for the occurrences of the passport specific information. The custom grammar creation allows for further enrichment of data.

Secure

The workspace in Data Discovery provide analytical views, sensitive data types, key risk indicators as well as privacy scoring thresholds for better decision making. The analytics-based tagging, keywords, and data enrichment help create and refine data subsets, to identify risk, and ultimately take action on the data needs to be managed (e.g. collect, delete)

Govern

Many government regulations grant individuals the right to find out what personal data and organization holds about them. The pre-defined Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) workspace template helps identify data subject information and organize data into subsets allowing DSARs to be processed. The sensitive data preservation and its life cycle management is possible through the integration with Micro Focus Content Manager.

In summary:

• The Data Administrator gain control over the files containing sensitive information
• Drive competitive advantage by securing data and adhering to the evolving government regulations in more than a single jurisdiction
• All this without impacting users ability to collaborate on files using either the client for OES, SMB client, or Filr on any platform.

                        Architecture: Open Enterprise Server and Micro Focus Data Discovery

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Please reach out to us on OES at microfocus dot com for more details.

[i] Gartner, “Are you ready for GDPR?”, Jill Beadle, May 16, 2018

[ii] Gartner, “2020 Strategic Roadmap for Storage”, Jeff Vogel, Julia Palmer, Michael Hoeck, Jerry Rozeman, Santhosh Rao, Joseph Unsworth, July 1, 2020