Where is your data?

I’ve had a few conversations this past week about what may be trends next year. One of them obviously is 365 Copilot. So the next question to ask is “How do we make that work, what do we need to do first?”. Never be a blocker to the business, always look for solutions etc.

There aren’t many real world deployments with lessons learned yet, and there’s shared responsibility in the deployment. So the caveat is what makes us comfortable now rather than a specific ‘How to’. An initial exercise if you like.

Two of those discussions immediately brought up Data location, classification and security. Subjects pretty much guaranteed to make eyes glaze over and somebody will no doubt say “That’s an IT issue”. (By data I also mean documents, presentations, spreadsheets etc).

So the first questions to answer are probably:

💡Where is your data? (All of it)
💡Do you have it categorised correctly? (All of it)
💡Do you have it organised? (All of it)
💡Do only the correct people have access to it?
💡Does everyone in the business know how to categorise and save data?

If any of the answers are ‘No’ or ‘Um…’ then that’s possibly the first thing to tackle. Examples that would make me nervy? Sensitive financial data or HR data.

Some questions we couldn’t answer (yet) so they’re for a risk register. Such as “What if somebody saved sensitive data accidentally in a less controlled location? Humans are humans, how would we know?”. Is that enhanced DLP processes? It’s still within the corporate boundary. Don’t know.

It’s an interesting challenge. Any links to further reading appreciated.

[For a graphic I did ask Stable Diffusion to come up with something showing the importance of data classification to the business. It came up with something so horribly vague and corporate, I just couldn’t. As one of the discussions was with a very good friend over wine - this seemed far more appropriate]