This year, for Mother's Day, my husband suggested to keep the kids busy while I sort out my closet (he got me flowers too...).

Lately it's been a real challenge: I didn't keep up with the cloths piling up on my dresser and the pile got bigger and bigger. Standing in front of a chaotic pile of cloths in the morning, I faced a critical decision: am I going to be on time for the carpool, or dressed in style? The carpool won almost every day...

So this morning I sorted the pile, decided which cloths I'm not going to wear anymore and can through away, which ones need to be washed and ironed again, and which ones need to be hanged in the closet. But the best part was finding those clothes that were hiding in the back of the closet, the one I completely forgot about. It's was like getting new clothes without killing my bank account!

Data Management in organizations has the same symptoms: you accumulate a lot of it, and then you forget about it. But while forgetting about clothes can hurt only your bank account, the results of forgetting about data stored in your organization can be much more devastating. If you don't remember that you've created a testing environment, and used some real-world, live data for your tests, you might forget to protect this environment and control access to the real-world data it contains. Unfortunately, this happens very often. It is very common for organizations to clone a production databases into QA environments for testing, and then these databases are just left out there. Once the tests are done, they are forgotten and left unmanaged and unprotected. These databases are the #1 target for data theft and data compromising attacks.

This is what makes the discovery process so important, and a critical first step for securing your organizations data. SecureSphere helps you discover your data and manage access to it.

I wish there was SecureSphere for my closet....

Happy Mother's Day Everyone!!!

Dana