Empowering enterprises to achieve true data management by unearthing data intelligence and supporting confident decision making— Congruity360

Every business relies on data, and data management strategies empower companies to better organize and access the information they’ve gathered across a wide range of software solutions in order to improve business operations.

In a modern business environment, virtually every piece of software collects data; these include accounting software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, point of sale software, credit card processing software, and more. These systems feed a wide variety of data into the business, including customer, financial, and proprietary business data.

Given the digital nature of our modern economy, companies have access to more data than ever before. This data creates a foundation of informational intelligence for essential business decisions. The flip side, however, is the implicit risk that comes along with storing such a proliferation of data. Storing old, unneccesary, and duplicative data increases an organization’s vulnerability to a data breach. Breaches result in steep financial and reputational penalties that can be quite damaging. Companies must invest in data management solutions that improve visibility, security, reliability, and scalability to ensure employees have the right data for decision-making while taking care to reduce unnecessary data risk.

How data is managed directly relates to data quality, which must be unassailable if any data analytics efforts are to bear fruit. Decisions based on faulty data will be faulty decisions, so data quality should be of the utmost importance to any business relying on this information.

Most modern businesses recognize the value of data, and for small businesses, this often means relying on reports generated within the individual software platforms they use for daily operations. However, there comes a time when unifying this data in a central, standardized source is necessary.

As the number of business software platforms proliferates, so too does a business’s ability to gather data and employ data analytics to derive key insights from it. However, organizing that data in a centralized system can sometimes be challenging. Developing a data management strategy is a must for businesses that want to maintain a competitive advantage and improve customer-facing and internal business operations elements.

In addition, data management should serve as standardized data to make it practical for business purposes. Not every software platform will collect data in the same way or even collect the same data types. Data management serves to unify these data silos, so they become useful when combined.

One of the best data management providers that assist enable data classification and governance is Congruity360. Congruity360 is a single-source data governance provider bringing order to data chaos. Their solutions keep enterprise data secure, healthy, and agile, exposing reliable data sets that empower businesses to make intelligent decisions. With a focus on cost savings, simplicity, and efficiency, Congruity360 introduces simple workflows, reduced storage footprints, and maximum productivity to every engagement.

Since 2006, Congruity360 has been at the forefront of data management. They stayed ahead of the technological curve, anticipating enterprise data challenges as they unfold in the market in real time. Congruity360 removes the burden of ever-evolving data management from the IT team and allows business unit owners to be true stewards of the data their teams produce. They empower enterprises to achieve a state of true data management, unearthing invaluable data intelligence that supports confident business decision making.

Congruity360 is a holistic data management provider enhancing the value of technology investments by improving data quality, offering cost optimization across IT operating expenses, providing control of disparate data sets, and expediting project timelines from a universal IT level – not the application level. A layer of cross-functional review tools empowers different teams within an organization to collaboratively manage data, delivering powerful data governance with built-in checks and balances.

Congruity360’s ideal customers are enterprises with large and growing data sets across disparate storage systems and cloud applications, needing real-time visibility into their data footprint to inform & execute data decisions. They want to shift from on-prem infrastructure to a cloud-based storage strategy but may feel overwhelmed by the process. By implementing ongoing, automated workflows, they help customers feel empowered – not burdened by – their data.

The following excerpts were taken from a conversation with Brian Davidson, CEO of Congruity360

Q. Why did you choose this business arena, and how far-reaching is the company?

We have always been in the data management industry, first pioneering on-premise storage optimization and third-party maintenance over a decade ago. As enterprise data storage started shifting to the cloud, we recognized the opportunity to support a hybrid enterprise storage strategy comprised of both on-prem and cloud setups. The recent onslaught of global data privacy regulations cemented the importance of comprehensive data management strategies. Congruity360 is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, with an additional presence in Northern Ireland, and serves customers across the globe.

Q. What are the perks of picking Congruity360?

Congruity360 removes the burden of data management from the IT team and allows business unit owners to be true stewards of the data their teams produce. Through Classify360, its SaaS classification platform, Congruity360 empowers businesses to achieve a state of true data management. An automated, legally defensible data management strategy that upholds retention policies and ensures regulatory compliance permits enterprises to focus resources on revenue-driving operations. With solid data intelligence in its corner, a business is far less susceptible to the risks of data breaches, can rapidly respond to requests to be forgotten, and is able to confidently deploy cloud storage solutions knowing that its risky, private data is appropriately protected.

Other data solutions used throughout the business, like data loss prevention tools, that take in data that Classify360 classifies, provide better business outputs because they work with accurate, clean data from the start.

Q. How are your solutions different from response measures like a lift-and-shift to the cloud or implementing pointOEM?

Rather than taking virtually all data and applications as-is and dropping them into a new repository, as you do with a lift-and-shift, Classify360 enables Intelligent Migrations^TM. By sorting historical data with Classify360 before a migration allows an organization to take relevant action on data before moving it. Old, stale data can be deleted; highly protected, proprietary data can be stored in the most secure of repositories, while regularly accessed workloads may be kept in warmer storage.

Q. Throw light on the features of CLASSIFY360, and how distinguished are they?

Congruity360 classifies and enables complete structured and unstructured data management with the Classify360 classification platform. Classify360 is a secure, powerful, cloud-based data management solution that empowers users to classify their sensitive data and take action to enforce data quality standards. With Classify360, users can do the following:

• Organize unstructured data into secure, virtual repositories without removing or copying files from the source
• Search repositories for sensitive data
• Run models in the repositories for duplicates, categorization, and risk analysis
• Use models and searches in drill-down analysis to classify sensitive data
• Run manual or automated policies to perform actions on sensitive data right at the source

Q. How has your team contributed to the best of the company?

Congruity360 is built on the shoulders of its employees. The company is an exciting blend of tenured enterprise roots with a start-up feel; team members often wear many hats and push themselves to learn new skills to take a project over the finish line as we bring Classify360 and its unique features to the market.

Without our self-motivated team members, we would not have the success we currently enjoy within the data management market.

Q. How satisfied are your customers with your services?

Our customers are extremely satisfied. We constantly solve unique business use cases and identify problem areas that these customers didn’t know existed.

Q. What are your latest achievements in taking companies to the next level?

Recently, a significant global insurance broker partnered with Congruity360 to problem solve for an email classification strategy that relied entirely upon manual classification subject to human error. Classify360 created classification parameters around the customer’s policies and business rules.

Beyond simplifying the classification process, Classify360 also found that a human had improperly classified nearly 10% of the customer’s historical email repository. This data was not correctly maintained as per appropriate retention policies, leaving the customer vulnerable to potential breaches, fines, and penalties.

Now, the customer enjoys an automated, rapid email classification process that provides highly accurate results with a significantly reduced timeline and involves virtually no human interaction. Classify360 not only solved a historical data classification problem (and uncovered significant, previously unknown risk) but furthermore set up the customer for ongoing responsible, reliable data management procedures.

Guiding Congruity360 to help businesses correctly implement their data

Brian Davidson is the CEO of Congruity360. His professional career originated with co-founding several successful IT companies, Rockland IT Solutions, and MSDI, which ultimately led to Congruity360. Brian has proven success in both direct and indirect sales models, revenue generation, operational excellence, and strategic vendor management.

“Classify360 centralizes data management by rapidly identifying, normalizing, and classifying data across on-prem and cloud sources – protecting data that strengthens a business and remediating the data that weakens it.”