So. Much. Data.

According to some estimates, 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years, and growth is only accelerating. While storage costs have dropped as data volumes have ballooned, organizations are still running into trouble when they don’t optimize their data storage environments for factors such as cost and regulatory compliance.

By embracing solid data lifecycle management practices, you can overcome major challenges — such as cost, retrieval, disaster recovery and management — and keep up with the rapid pace of your data’s growth.

Cloud governance is a framework that guides how end users make use of cloud services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment. It’s imperative to have good cloud governance because it’s a foundational element to your cloud practice that provides the ability to scale and be successful.

Migrating to the cloud is an exciting journey as it provides greater flexibility to the IT teams for creating resources and provisioning them. Gone are the days when it used to take weeks and months to request resources and additional provisioning from the infrastructure teams. Cloud vendors now provide the capabilities to create resources such as compute instances plus add-on software, databases, firewall groups, storage, etc. via APIs.

The cloud-provided capabilities are very powerful and can potentially bring many inconsistencies and resource ownership issues into the environment.

Education and government organizations are accustomed to strict regulations on data privacy and security. Organizations must stay compliant with regard to how and where they store data; who can access it, how and for what purposes; and how they preserve privacy in data analysis. But this year, leaders in all sectors are taking another look at their data — and, in some cases, deploying master data management solutions — to maintain compliance in remote operations.

One reason for the renewed attention to compliance is that many organizations are collecting new types of data. In schools and colleges, for example, videoconferencing platforms may capture video and audio, along with academic and personal information. Many organizations have managed remote work by expanding their use of cloud computing, which triggers encryption and security protocols for data at rest, in transit and in analysis.

Onsite, organizations are gathering data through technology solutions designed to facilitate safe interactions and maintain social distancing, such as thermal imaging for temperature screenings or video recordings and analytics for occupancy control and contact tracing. All this data must be properly managed and stored.

I recently fielded a call from a school district that had moved some virtual machines into the cloud with Amazon Web Services. The district had an initial scope (and budget) for just 30 VMs but then quickly expanded to well over 100 cloud instances. Predictably, costs skyrocketed.

This might look like an unforced error on the part of district officials. But even large enterprises with sophisticated IT shops often run into problems when they first migrate resources to the public cloud. They may let costs run out of control due to sprawl, for example, or have trouble maintaining an environment that complies with specific industry regulations, such as HIPAA, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

One simple solution to these problems is to enter a partnership with a trusted managed service provider such as CDW. Relying on deep experience developed over years of working closely with organizations in virtually all industries, an effective MSP can help businesses monitor and optimize their cloud environments for cost, performance, security and compliance.

Today’s privacy environment is far different from the landscape that businesses faced only a few years ago. This movement began in the European Union, which in 2018 replaced its existing privacy rules with the General Data Protection Regulation. This sweeping privacy law provided broad worldwide protection for the personal information of EU residents. GDPR’s reach spread well beyond the European continent, as almost every large American company has some business presence in Europe. Organizations scrambled to understand the impact of these new regulations and update their European-facing websites to comply with the new standards.

In July 2020, privacy regulations hit closer to home when enforcement of the California Consumer Privacy Act began. CCPA provides GDPR-style protections to residents of California. Due to the difficulty of segregating information about California residents, most companies are choosing to apply CCPA standards to all of their customer information. In fact, many privacy experts suspect that other states will soon follow California’s example and pass their own consumer privacy legislation.

Here are a few things that you can do to make sure that your organization is ready for these new regulations and whatever is next on the privacy horizon.

Technology is more important than ever to the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. For many firms, IT is a top driver of deals, but it can also be a sticking point.

In its “Corporate M&A Report 2020,” Bain warns of the challenges posed by IT integration: “In a tech-enabled world, deal scrutiny is expanding to include issues such as data ownership and access to critical technology, often prompted by national interests, as well as the impact on future competition. The time, complexity and the resources to get deals over the regulatory hurdle are rising — it will take longer than you think and cost more than you expect.”

It’s essential for organizations to prepare for the integration process and enter it with their eyes open. These four types of technology tools can help to streamline IT integration.