I have a love hate relationship with the squirrel. I do find them cute, particularly the red squirrels with their pointy fluffy tipped ears. I also think that white squirrels and jet black squirrels have an eery awesomeness to those regressive genes of theirs. But ultimately, just like for rats, mice and other vermin, I am probably not really a squirrel fan.
Squirrels in my mind, are ultimately not much more than bushy tailed rats. As a child growing up, I remember the squirrels sitting in the trees mocking the dogs and cats. Now you could say that they were just making warning noises like meerkats warning the troop of predators but I am not convinced. Squirrels, if you have never heard them, have a high pitched chirping bark and as a kid a remember them going on and on and on – driving the dogs and cats in our yard, up the proverbial wall. They would also raid the bird feeders and in the winter months raid the eaves of the roof and nest in the crawl space above the rafters. A real domestic pest.
In my apartment block I even had them living in the air space between the brick walls, they somehow accessed this by way of the roof drain – weird! I tried everything to get rid of them, capsicum spray, chili powder those ultrasonic noise makers and even terrorising them every time i saw them by beating on the windows and walls when i saw them looking in at us. It became a comedy for my family. Eventually we moved and now I don’t have squirrel issues any more.
When others think of squirrels, most of them probably think of them in a similar vein to those adorable chipmunks in cartoons, I guess they are related somehow, I never bothered to research that fact, what I do know is that they love seeds and nuts. You’ll find them foraging about all year around the base of nut and fruit bearing trees. They love dumpster raiding as omnivores in the cities and many a time I have seen them sitting on a wall with a slice of discarded bread hanging out of their toothy chops.
there’s a bit of data squirrel in each of us
Just as squirrels are ubiquitous, so too are data squirrels. There’s no ‘official’ classification of a data squirrel but when I describe this individual, you might recognise these traits in either yourself or a colleague.
The whole topic becomes probably ever more important with the emergence of the GDP regulations in Europe. GDPR applies if a business is based in the EU as well as organizations based outside the European Union if they collect or process personal data of EU residents. Personal data is any information relating to an individual, whether it relates to his or her private, professional or public life. It can be anything from a name, a home address, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer’s IP address. This data can only be stored, handled and distributed or accessed in very specific ways and failure to follow the regulations puts a given business at risk of fines for failure to put appropriate controls in place.
Companies that handle card payments have to adhere to a similar set of standards for PCI DSS – a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) which is a proprietary information security standard for organizations that handle branded credit cards from the major card schemes including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB. It has been suggested that PCI 3.2 Compliant Organizations Are Likely GDPR Compliant – I am not convinced though.
Returning to these squirrels, consider the number of versions of the same data that you have floating around as either backup copies or ‘originals’. The rationale for the copy may be multivarious. You may have copies that exist as a safety net because some mass change was undertaken or perhaps because a data structure was modified or they may simply be out there because data was brought from another system and this was the staged data. When the copy was created, hopefully it was given a suitable name to identify it as a backup or a temporary store, you would be surprised how often that is not the case though.
With storage as cheap as it is, and with the ability to quickly access systems of record with a variety of tools on the market, creating clones, snapshots and quick data dumps can quickly get out of hand. The biggest issue is the lack of transparency in this whole squirrelling activity. IT may be among the worst, because they are driving the big iron in the business but don’t underestimate the number of business data squirrels that are out there. Proliferation of data clones not only represents a compliance issue, it also constitutes a waste of resources and presents itself as an opportunity to data abuse. Because this data is not used operationally on an ongoing basis, its presence is often obscured from auditors and others who would likely have a field day if the database and data stores were audited in detail.
How do Squirrels Find their Nuts?
Of course, I am talking mostly about relational data, tables, databases and spreadsheets but the same applies to photographs, documents, video content and images as well as other digital objects like schematics and design drawings. The data can be structured or unstructured. A lack of a proper repository and a proper cataloging system will quickly result in the creation of duplicates and version issues and no single authoritarian version of the truth. This can disrupt business continuity and actually put your business at risk. Unlike real-life squirrels, as human data squirrels, unless we have a proper system, we may not have the ability to find our hidden troves of data.
Do yourself a favour today and start making a concerted effort to avoid squirrelling data and at the very least institute some formality to the way you select, define, stage, evaluate and purge squirrelled data.
The original version of this article was posted on LinkedIn