The Challenge of Effectively Accessing and Sharing Sensitive Data

This post is an excerpt from our recent report with DataStax, Powering Growth and Innovation for Hybrid Cloud. To download the full report, head here.

By efficiently accessing and analyzing the vast amounts of disparate data collected from various government sources, your agency can proactively enhance decision-making.

But this data that your agency manages in particular – highly sensitive, personal and private information, often critical to our nation’s security – is only useful if it can be securely stored, immediately accessed and available for analysis.

The most significant challenge federal agencies face when it comes to data is actually accessing it. Your agency likely has assets across locations and clouds – on-premise, in different facilities and in multiple clouds, with different levels of user access and security. When data is not easily accessed or stored or is residing in multiple locations with varying levels of access, it is difficult to make data-driven decisions, maintain security and share across a variety of departments and users.

DoD is currently struggling with this issue, as it cited in its recently released cloud strategy:

“The DoD has multiple disjointed and stove-piped information systems distributed across modern and legacy infrastructure around the globe leading to a litany of problems that impact warfighters’, decision makers’, and DoD staff’s ability to organize, analyze, secure, scale, and ultimately, capitalize on critical information to make timely, data-driven decisions.”

DoD’s components are not the only ones facing this data challenge. Your agency is likely already aware that by efficiently accessing and analyzing the vast amounts of disparate data collected from various government sources, you could proactively enhance decision-making.

“There are executive and agency-level mandates to move to the cloud, or to a specific cloud,” said Christine Cox, Regional Vice President, DataStax. “Agencies are very concerned about the accessibility and security of their data, once they move to that cloud environment. Maintaining autonomy over their data is an important consideration that they have going forward.”

How can you reconcile all this data to have it available in the cloud so the right people can access it, securely, at the right time, to make thoughtful decisions that benefit mission outcomes?

“Being able to move that data from one place to another, be it from their on-premise data center to the cloud that they’re currently managing, or, in the future from one cloud solution to another, or even just to house that data in more than one cloud environment, is critical,” Cox said.