In today’s data-centric world, having access to quality data is key to making informed decisions and staying ahead. As a result, organizations often invest significant resources into data collection systems. But a patchwork of software can quickly become an IT nightmare, consume company resources, and waste countless hours of staff time.
The very systems you thought would help your organization make data-driven decisions are now causing serious challenges. Instead of more data visibility, you can’t keep track of where data is coming from or where it’s going. Maintaining governance over your data feels impossible.
You now fear that the data at your organization is no longer secure. Or worse, your organization is no longer in compliance with regulations like GLBA or CCPA. Surely, other organizations have figured out how to leverage data better than this? Unfortunately, disparate data due to multi-platform data collection is a common problem.
The Problem with Disparate Data
In a recently commissioned survey, 250 CIOs and CISOs of enterprise organizations revealed concerns about their data collection and management processes.
- 92% of IT and security leaders rely on multiple data collection systems.
- 4.31 is the average number of data collection systems at their organizations.
- 21% reported having near complete visibility into their data collection systems.
- Three in five reported having less than 50% governance over their data.
It’s clear that multi-platform systems for collecting data don’t allow for unified business operations. They also make it difficult to build a strong, data-centric strategy for collecting, managing, and securing data. Here are the main ways disparate data can lead to poor data visibility and governance.
1. Information Silos
Data collected within separate departments may not be available to the rest of the organization. This is especially true when each department uses a different system or process to gather data. This often results in duplicate data that is formatted inconsistently. Worst of all, it leads to siloed data.
Even if teams can access and combine the data from multiple systems, it most likely won’t be accurate or optimized. This will make it difficult to get real visibility into the data. Without good visibility or synchronization, departments won’t be able to make informed or effective decisions.
2. IT Complexity
Implementing a centralized data collection solution organization-wide can seem overwhelming and complex. But the long-term use of multi-platform systems can become increasingly complex for IT to manage. Not only does this become costly, but it can also require ongoing maintenance, especially for legacy systems.
For every system that doesn’t have the proper integration or other capabilities, IT will need to spend time making custom updates. This constant maintenance can take up significant time and resources. The older the system, the more difficult and complex to modernize. Furthermore, legacy systems often come with compliance issues that increase security risks.
3. Poor Data Control
Using multiple platforms for data collection also makes it increasingly challenging to maintain control over the data. This only becomes more problematic with the more data your organization collects. If you don’t know where data is coming from, where it’s going, or where it’s being stored, it will be impossible to use it effectively.
Poor data control within multiple systems also leads to a lack of visibility into where data exists across an organization. This makes it difficult to ensure data is secure, enforce necessary administrative controls, and keep data optimized for effective use. Much time and resources will be required to make sure this data is accessible, usable, and compliant.
4. Security Risks
Put simply, more data collection systems mean more chances that one of them will be at risk for a security incident. This risk is greater if your organization relies on legacy systems to collect data. Managing so many systems can overload your security team. Worse yet, if your security team is stuck juggling multiple data collection platforms, a security vulnerability may go altogether unnoticed.
Multi-platform data collection also creates security risks simply due to the number of employees with access to data. Human error is unfortunately one of the leading causes of security breaches. Keeping track of multiple platforms is difficult enough. It can be nearly impossible to keep track of what access level each employee has to data as well as what data they handle on a daily basis.
Learn More with FormAssembly’s CIO
Today’s data-centric world is filled with data collection challenges that can limit your ability to maintain data governance and visibility. Learn how to overcome these concerns with FormAssembly’s CIO Jai Davda and our partner Tomer Madori of TechUnity in our “The State of Data Collection” webinar on March 21st.
Attend our webinar and receive first access to our survey report, “Digital Data Collection & Security: How CIOs and CISOs are managing practices, policies, and risk in online data collection.”
