7. Monitoring and Response | Data Profiling and Monitoring

7.1 Activity Summary

Activity Description

Once you have built a catalog of your unstructured data with ActiveNav Cloud, and addressed the findings of the initial discovery, you will enter a monitoring phase.

At this point you can schedule regular re-discovery of Data Sources to ensure that you monitor the growth of content within your unstructured data that does not comply with the organization’s desired data profile. 

Goals

  • Establish a periodic re-discovery for all Data Sources.

  • Identify a schedule that aligns with organizational policy.

  • Move to business as usual for management of the data profile. 

Participants

Project Manager, Application Administrator, Data Analysts, and IT Team

Pre-requisites

Initial discovery and review has been performed on the Data Sources to be monitored.

Outputs

Up to date visibility of data profile.

As you complete the initial discovery for each Data Source there will normally be a wide range of findings that need to be reviewed and remediated. For a large range of repositories this initial activity could represent a significant investment of time from Data Analysts, and therefore it is critical to protect that investment. This can be achieved by scheduling regular re-discovery so that changes in the risk profile are captured.

7.2 Identify Data Sources for Re-Discovery

The first task is to determine which Data Sources should be re-discovered to maintain an updated status. Some Data Sources may have been built from static archive data that need not be refreshed.

For the Data Sources that require refreshing, you must decide how frequently they should be re-discovered. This will be a subjective assessment based on how frequently the repository is used.

7.3 Establish Rediscovery Schedule

Once you have determined which Data Sources require re-discovery, and the appropriate frequency, you can begin to schedule these activities.

This can be carried out via the Data Source overview page, as outlined in the KBA linked below:

Data Source Overview

You can schedule re-discoveries to occur on a one time basis, as well as at intervals such as every week, month, 3 months, 6 months or a year. The ability to establish an automated schedule will be introduced in the future. The re-discovery process will use the metadata recorded during previous discovery activities so that if Feature Extraction is required, it will be applied only to new and changed objects. This will usually mean that the time required for re-discovery is significantly less than the initial Discovery duration.

7.4 Review Results

 When the re-discovery has been performed the status of the Data Source can be reviewed. Normally this would be done by assessing changes in the data profile for any Business Units associated with the Data Source.

7.5 Review Configuration

If you are utilizing custom Feature Extraction rules you should periodically review them to ensure that they still cover your data profiling requirements.

Note that any time that you update your rule configuration, subsequent rediscovery tasks will take longer as the new rules must be applied to all objects.

If your compliance requirements change over time you may also need to review the age range configurations that you have applied to your business units.

Additional collectors may be added to decrease the time to scan on-premise repositories, and increase the speed of inventory discovery. For best practices on collector management, refer to the following KBA:

Collector and Collector Groups Overview