Why centralize a company's data?
Efficiency question :
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly common, successful integration of these technologies begins with sound data management and protection.
Centralizing a company’s data makes it easier to structure, control and protect. The organization can more clearly determine where its data is stored and who can access it.
An important rule is to give data access to the people who need it to do their jobs, and only to those people. This least-access approach limits exposure while keeping information available to authorized users.
Key considerations:
Data centralization must be accompanied by clear access rules. The organization must determine which users or groups can view each type of information and limit access to their actual needs.
The organization must also clearly define its storage rules: what data is kept, where it is stored and who is responsible for managing it.
This structure becomes especially important when artificial intelligence is integrated into the workplace, because data protection and access management should be established before these tools are made available to users.
Challenges:
When data is stored in cloud environments such as SharePoint or OneDrive, available storage is not unlimited.
A strategy may therefore be needed to distinguish recent data that should remain readily accessible from historical data that can be archived in another environment.
Managing multiple environments or tenants can therefore form part of the storage strategy. The organization should determine what data is stored in each environment and who is responsible for it.
Technology:
The choice between a cloud environment and a traditional server should be considered in light of the organization’s needs.
Cloud environments can centralize data and make it available to authorized users, but they also require an appropriate security strategy.
The storage strategy should also include a backup strategy to protect data and provide for recovery if a problem occurs.
Developer's advice:
Centralizing data does not necessarily mean storing all company information in one location.
It may be preferable to create several centralized environments based on the nature and sensitivity of the data. Financial and accounting data, for example, can be centralized in one environment while production data is centralized in another.
What matters is having a clear structure that identifies where each category of data should be stored, who is responsible for it and which users are authorized to access it.