Data Modeling: Motivated by the Data

The motivation behind Complete Data Quality’s data modeling solution is very personal in many ways because I have been an entrepreneur for over twenty years and over the last few years, I have a growing concern; company and personal data exposure. I get a little sick to my stomach when I think about all of my sensitive data that has been exposed over the last twenty years through email interactions with accountants, attorneys, insurance companies, and financial institutions while doing normal everyday business transactions and activities.

What concerns me the most is that all of the sensitive information is embedded within the unstructured body of emails. When the requirements identified by the California Consumer Privacy Act are considered, I am pretty positive that the firms that I work with would not be able to identify what sensitive data of mine, my companies, my employees, or my clients that they have stored in emails over the last twenty years.

Beyond knowing that the sensitive data exists, the information needs to be made viable for compliance in the CCPA sensitive data example. This means the sensitive data needs to be extracted out of the email body and made available to identify exactly what sensitive data is being stored by the organization for any individuals that reside in California.

This may sound extreme to some people, but I guarantee that the email exposure is much larger than anyone is imagining. Take a moment and think about the sensitive information that you have shared via email just doing your job or related to your job. Even within internal email systems, the information is being spread within the organization and becomes exposed to internal threats. The reality is that every organization has this exposure. The other reality is that there is more business data in emails than just the sensitive data for individuals.

Everyone knows that there is more unstructured business data than structured. The ability to identify and make the business data viable from within an unstructured value is another major motivation behind the data modeling solution. The primary goal of the data modeling solution is to make the business data within unstructured values viable for business use.

Understand that our solution is capable of modeling data from any unstructured value, not just the body of emails. We use the email example because every organization has email and email sensitive data exposure.

We will continue to use an email example to introduce the Clean Cloud software because emails contain a mixture of all three types of data; structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. The data modeling solution seamlessly handles all three types of data, and emails demonstrate this capability perfectly.