Eye on the Drive. Eye on the Data.

From the data center to the client device, the typical Global 2000 organization has thousands of storage devices. However, often overlooked is the physical inventory of hard drives and tape cartridges – many of which are on the move on a frequent basis impacting both operations and security. During a typical week, how many events may take place where storage devices are physically handled by employees, service engineers, erasure and disposition vendors, off-site logistics, disaster recovery and media management vendors and others? Analyst’s estimate the number of storage device “touches” can exceed several hundred in the data center alone, never mind distributed devices such as laptops, desktops or printers.

Don’t blink, you may miss something.

With these high touch/wide ranging scenarios in mind, ITADSecurity developed the WatchDog platform – a suite of tools totally dedicated to storage device lifecycle management (SDLM). Deployed and managed as a stand-alone tool or easily integrated with existing SRM, ITAM, Security and GRC tools, WatchDog starts by identifying critical storage infrastructure. Continuously monitoring the on-line storage device inventory, events such as failed, new or missing devices or those behaving abnormally immediately initiate WatchDog to begin cataloguing and reconciling of touches entailed in the repair, replacement and disposition stages of the off-line storage device lifecycle.

Controls, Assurance, Validation.

Based on your rules, WatchDog manages each situation ensuring control, consistency and validation of proper storage device handling and documentation. Every touch by employees and vendors both on and off-site is assessed and catalogued by WatchDog. The result is an end to end validation, down to the serial number of each and every storage device, concluding each lifecycle with a legally defensible audit trail.

How much of your data sits on disk and tape? All of it!

Operational consistency also lends itself to risk management as mishandled and unaccounted for storage devices is surprisingly the root cause of most data breaches. WatchDog provides auditable tracking of the device from first write to the last known event plus validates security including encryption, DLP and backup status. This is the story an auditor will be looking for that disparate tools and home grown spread sheets cannot provide.