DISA has compiled a set of 8 guiding principles for DoD data – these are all published in the DISA Data Strategy Iplan v1.0.  In this series, we’ll be reviewing each principle in depth and as follows:  

#1 Data is a Strategic Asset

#2 Collective Data Stewardship

#3 Data Ethics

#4 Data Collection

#5 Enterprise-Wide Data Access and Availability

#6 Data for Artificial Intelligence Training

#7 Data Fit for Purpose

#8 Design for Compliance

Data is a Strategic Asset

“DoD data is a high-interest commodity and must be leveraged in a way that brings both immediate and lasting military advantage.”

Leveraging your data begins with data intelligence. Data intelligence is an outcome. It emerges from the disciplines of data discovery, classification, sensitivity tagging, permission analysis, etc. In order to provide enterprise-wide data intelligence, it is essential that the solution supports the ability to connect to and introspect all major enterprise data sources. The only alternative would be to employ a stove pipe approach which never satisfies. This way, data lifecycle management processes can be consolidated in terms of data retention policy, data remediation policy and actions, data tagging and labeling rules, data quality, data stewardship, data privacy assurance, etc. The economies gained through a single source of data intelligence are immense. The days of stove piped views of enterprise data are long gone.

The reality, however, is that very few vendors offer a single lens through which to view all enterprise data. Most vendors limit their approach/scope to cloud-only data sources, structured data sources, unstructured data sources, the mainframe, or bigdata. It is clearly impractical, if not absurd, to purchase, deploy, and maintain a different data intelligence solution for each of these data enclaves.

Impactful data intelligence calls for a singular lens through which all data can be viewed, understood, and managed. It calls for a Data Security Platform (DSP) that pairs an enterprise metadata registry with a state of the art data discovery platform.

It calls for BigID.

Forrester provides an overview of 32 DSP-related vendors in their recent report, “The Data Security Platforms Landscape, Q1 2023“.