Major Media Company

Background / Problem

GDPR covers a wide range of data issues, and in this particular case, the clients needed the ability to show that they were in control of their data, knowing who was accessing the data they hold and when.

Solution

This required us to write a programme to parse a huge number of logs from user written queries across a number of different coding languages in different environments, and develop a metadata database along with a suite of reports to alert an administrator should any of the set rules be broken as well as provide a summary of the data usage.

In parallel to this we also provided data lineage tracking as well as waterfall reporting per data entity, another key to being in accordance with GDPR, as well and making it easier to see the knock-on affects of any data issues

Having the metadata, usage and lineage meant that we were able to provide the method and tools by which they were able to assign a value to each data point across different systems, providing a scientific basis for valuing certain data sources (or points) above others, and knowing the impact an outage or corruption might cause.

The FTEs that it would take to manually complete the tasks completed by this process would be in the hundreds, if not thousands. This work also plays a key part in covering their bases regarding GDPR (although admittedly it’s much wider than just the work we completed), which, if they were not in compliance with would potentially see them hit with a fine of 4% of their annual turnover (which for this particular company would be in excess of £680 million).