This week we sit down with our CEO Mark Brosnan to discuss the true challenges Organisations are facing today managing Governance.

Hi Mark, how did Getvisibility come to be?

Good data security and governance is not a destination, it’s a journey. Every organisation is on a different stage of that journey and that journey can be fraught with risk, confusion, wrong turns, uphill struggles, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.

The worlds data increased from 41 to 64.2 Zettabytes in 2020 and is predicted to reach 180 zettabytes by 2025. With that, 95% of businesses recognise the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business.

Like planning for any journey, the key to success is having the right tools and equipment. For data governance and security, knowing what data you have, where it is stored and what it is, is absolutely crucial to planning the optimal journey.

Whilst that sounds like an obvious starting point, the reality is that companies don’t know what data they have, where it is stored, how it’s changing or what they should have. With the advent of cloud computing, collaboration tools and remote working, companies have a patchwork quilt of tools, applications and devices within and outside of their network. 

This was an ongoing discussion that Ronan and I constantly had – no single solution could effectively see and classify all of an organisations data. With our collective backgrounds in AI and security we could solve exactly that.

Part of your day to day is speaking with customers, prospects and partners. Can you tell us about the challenges that companies are trying to solve for in relation to Governance?

Until Getvisibility arrived on the scene there was not one solution that could give full visibility of an organisations data. There are dependencies on platforms and operating systems. 

Other Data discovery and classification solutions rely on arcane manual processes and with enough time and money maybe they could uncover 60% of that data. Being able to see and classify 60% of your data is not good enough when that 40% could contain your most sensitive company IP. You don’t know what you don’t know. If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist!

At Getvisibility we have focused on the whole data landscape and not just the possible systems and Operating systems we should cover. That means we are agnostic when it comes to platforms and operating systems (we will shortly become the first solution to run on Mac). This also means that we will find the data wherever it is, whether that is legacy or dynamic.

Can you tell us about some of the innovation that has arisen from customer conversations?

Recently we were helping a large Insurance federation with their governance. Upon scanning their environment we noticed a large amount of image files in their system. As you can imagine in Insurance and other Financial organisations, copies of identification and driving licenses are needed daily and for each account.
We quickly iterated our solution to enable discovery and classification through Optical Character Recognition. Now all image files within that company are tagged accordingly.
We also have quite a large user base in the Middle East and have developed Multi-lingual Artificial Intelligence in Arabic.
Some of our more data sensitive clients are also very excited about our enforced classification feature. This means that when data is created you can “force” the end user to classify documents accordingly. Also you can force classify data from certain people or departments when you know what they are working on is sensitive.

Time to value is of huge importance when making buying decisions. How does a customer know that they are getting a good return on their investment?

Being able to see what is happening within your organisations data at multiple levels is crucial to creating actionable insights. Our Reports focus on a high level overview for Board Members, a strategic report with measurable results for C Level and department management and granular actionable reports for staff and contractors. This ensures that all levels of the organisation are informed on what is relevant to them.
It’s fantastic to be able to see and classify all of your data, but what do you do with it? If you do not have insights into how at risk you are, you can waste a lot of time and resource trying to figure out what to do. We provide those actionable insights to drive your strategy.

What trends do you foresee with the Zero Trust movement and how are you preparing for it?

I recently had an in depth conversation with Getvisibility fellow Co-Founder Ronan on Zero Trust. The term has been overused and has lost its meaning in the mountains of marketing noise out there. The conclusion was that Zero Trust at its core is a strategy to remove trust, and trust is a human emotion that has been injected into technology. Trust is a vulnerability and one that does not need coding. No one solution can provide Zero Trust however you have solutions that can help to achieve that strategy well.

Our focus and vision is to work towards executing that strategy and removing that trust in all organisations. This begins with full visibility and classification of data. We are constantly working on the application of our core technologies to security and governance and the long term goals around trust removal.

To find out more about Getvisibility, get in touch today