Roundtable

Can an auditor walk into your organisation tomorrow and leave impressed with the state of your storage, data governance and compliance to current South African law? If circumstances require you to comply with international standards as well, would you pass those tests too? If you can confidently say yes, then would you still be happy if the auditor was accompanied by an expert enterprise storage consultant, someone with the knowledge to see through any technical fudging? What if some government representatives with wide knowledge of the Consumer and Protection of Personal Information Acts were right behind them? Would they also agree with the checkboxes so confidently ticked? There’s a growing realisation among South African companies that these are real questions that need real answers soon, both because of business imperatives and looming legislation. Brian Balfe, solutions specialist at Dell SA, says he’s seen this realisation become more common.

“There’s a far deeper view of the fact that companies need to be doing something now than when we discussed this three years ago,” he says. “Then we were asking: compliance with what? Everyone now knows that there is new legislation in place. One of the myths is that governance and compliance is an IT function. It certainly can be implemented by IT but it can’t be driven by IT. It needs to be owned by a CFO, a COO or a CEO. We’re pushing an open door now and customers are looking at the relevance of information governance to their businesses. You can’t solve it with technology: it’s a business process decision. And I think we’re a lot closer to the European market than we were three years ago.”