BACKGROUND

Technical Field

This disclosure relates generally to a data management system.

Description of the Related Art

The amount of data used by and accessible to computer systems is extremely large, and growing quickly. One estimate is that in 2016, there is approximately 11,000 exabytes of such information, which was expected to climb to around 52,000 Exabytes in 2020. Rizzatti, Dr. Lauro. “Digital Data Storage Is Undergoing Mind-Boggling Growth.”EETimes,14 Sep. 2016. This article states that unstructured data (e.g., documents, photos, videos, etc.) accounts for most of the available data. In addition to typically being unstructured, data is often scattered around layers of a network (e.g., a cloud network, a data center network, a corporate network, etc.) with poor structuring and visibility. Given that data is often scattered and unstructured, this makes ensuring proper handling of the data quite difficult.

That data often includes certain classes of information that is either legally required to be treated in a particular manner (as in the case of government regulation) or is desired to be treated in some fashion (as in the case with an enterprise data management policy). But since data is often scattered and unstructured, protecting that data or even ensuring that it is properly handled is impractical as the necessary understanding of what data is stored, how it is stored, where it is stored, and/or how it is used is simply not there or severely limited.

In some cases, such as the health care context, certain data handling is legally mandated. Health care enterprises commonly store records for their patients that identify personal health information (PHI) such as demographic information, medical histories, insurance information, etc. These health care enterprises often need to exchange records with other enterprises, while also complying with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) provisions that set out requirements for protecting that health information. These records, however, are usually in an unstructured format (e.g., photos, videos, e-mail messages, WORD documents, portable document format (PDF), etc.), making it easy for an employee to store those records without identifying what content that they store. Thus, all possible locations where PHI might be stored in an on-premise file system or in cloud storage is not known. As an example, a PDF document that is incorrectly named might include PHI, but an enterprise may be unaware that the document does, in fact, store PHI. In such a scenario, a health care enterprise may unknowingly provide another enterprise with access to a database that includes records (e.g., PDFs) with PHI that should not be accessed by that other enterprise simply because the health care enterprise lacks an understanding of its data.

Even aside from legal mandates, data security is also of paramount importance. Data security management is normally performed by controlling access on the boundaries of a network. But once the network's perimeter defenses such as firewalls are breached, there may be little (if any) interior defense to prevent malware (e.g., a virus) from roaming and attacking the network by damaging or stealing sensitive data. In some cases, an “interior defense” strategy may involve an agent-based defense that requires every susceptible device in the network to run a local security process. But this approach presents multiple points of weakness within the network. Thus, if a single local process is out of date, disabled by a user, or has already been compromised, this could lead to a significant data breach.

