A single-source data governance provider bringing order to data chaos: Congruity360

The majority of CFOs now agree that their enterprise must effectively leverage operational data to gain insights. In the digital world we live in, many companies are struggling with data-related issues like data organization, lack of accuracy, poor data accessibility, and lack of collaboration between teams. One crucial thing that every business leader must do to overcome uncertainties is make sure that all the stakeholders are using the same data in the decision-making process. Businesses now have more data than before, making it paradoxically very distracting. Even businesses that do not cultivate their data are suffocating under heavy datasets. To bring order to this chaos and tame the colossal beast, companies must make use of an effective data management system.

Globally, there are various companies specializing in providing excellent data management solutions, but Congruity360 stands out from the rest. Congruity360 is a single-source data management provider bringing order to data chaos. Knowing the individual components of data management aren’t used in isolation, Congruity360 takes a holistic approach to manage your data. Congruity360’s Classify360 product is a single-source Data Classification & Governance solution delivering actionable data intelligence to empower strategic decisions around data reduction, compliance, and journey to the cloud. Congruity360 is a leader in ensuring complete data governance for organizations. Strengthen data investments and make smarter, quicker business decisions by rapidly identifying, normalizing, and classifying your multi-petabyte data sets for collaborative review. Congruity360 was founded in 2017 and is based in Norwell, Massachusetts.

In conversation with Brian Davidson, CEO and Co-Founder of Congruity360

Q. What would you say is one skill every tech executive should master?

IT hygiene is a skill that we will see and hear more about this year, especially within the tech industry. IT hygiene is much like physical hygiene, where you are maintaining your data and identifying potential gaps in your data. This involves keeping data clean and protected as well as improving efficiencies of devices, operating systems, and software. This allows for fewer vulnerabilities and more sight into weaknesses within an organization’s infrastructure.

Q. Lack of proper analysis can put businesses behind the competition and lead to unnecessary expenses. How can we improve data management and analysis?

Utilizing a tool that can give you insights into your data is essential for complete data management and analysis. By allowing the classification of data, you gain knowledge of what data you are holding onto in order to separate value from risk. Classification tools like Classify360 expose this information with an in-depth analysis of elements like the location of the data and specifically what type of data it is. This information allows you to reduce your data expense and exposure through the appropriate action workflows.

Q. Data is expected to continue to play a vital role in the ingestion, computation, storage, and management of information. How do you interpret this?

Data is information. A data classification policy, the basis for ingestion, computation, storage, and management, is and will continue to be the root of all information governance initiatives and policies. Data classification is required to efficiently prioritize information in order to effectively implement a holistic governance policy spanning quality, security, access, privacy, storage, and retention.

Q. How do you monitor the performance of the solution? What guidance and direction did you find most effective to train individuals to use your solution?

The following metrics are most important to measure the performance of our solution:

• Time to ingest and classify a PB of data
• High Recall (accuracy and precision) scoring
• Out of the box modeling/workflows utilized
• Customer Success (i.e. accelerated projects, cost savings, etc.)
• We find that training both individuals and our information engine is most effective when we jointly run a Classify360 workflow end to end with a subset of a customer’s data. This helps to set individuals up for success by tailoring the training to their individual business and data needs.

Q. In an increasingly regulated world, organizations are facing greater scrutiny than ever. Tell us about your compliance services.

We bucket our compliance service into three categories:

• Index & Audit Data- where you Identify critical assets and risks to understand your data landscape clearly, make educated classification decisions with our repository assessment tree & trainable classification models, and enforce retention policies with automatically applied actions.
• Maintain Regulatory Compliance- Mitigate non-compliance risk by regularly identifying and taking action on relevant data, enable automated regulatory reporting, and assess risk exposure and anticipate future threats with thorough data intelligence
• Protect Personal & Sensitive Information- Meet consent requirements by appropriately storing & using personal data and easily producing records upon request by authorities, fulfill individuals’ right to be forgotten by easily identifying & taking action on personal data, and reduce likelihood of a costly, time-sensitive data breach by applying automatic classification & action to personal data.

Q. How do you market your services?

Our services are complete SaaS solutions available directly from our team and most cloud marketplaces. (Consulting partners) We offer POC’s to demonstrate how our platform can impact your organization in addition to short and long-term production engagements.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

We recently completed an acquisition of a data migration business called Seven10 and have another acquisition that will be complete next month. In doing so, this expands our strategic value to our customers along with our global footprint (the newest acquisition is a company out of Ireland). These acquisitions help bolster our Classify360 offering because we can not only help businesses better map their data for things like ROT (redundant, obsolete, and trivial data), PHI, PCI, Dark Data, etc., but we can now also help empower these same businesses to move the data where they see fit. Being able to take action on the data is a key platform enhancement that we have invested heavily in. Mapping the data only gets you so far – the real win is when a business can move the colder storage to a cheaper storage layer or delete it to reduce risk and unnecessary cost. In addition, you can expect to see exciting news in regard to structured data, platform integrations, and cross-functional workflows. There is a lot more to discuss here, but you will need to call one of our team members to learn more!

Meet the leaders behind the success of Congruity360

Brian Davidson, CEO and Co-founder

Sean Brady, COO and Co-founder

The founders have been in the data management industry for over 20 years and are dedicated to transforming the role infrastructure plays in the world of information governance. There were a myriad of successful acquisitions and exits over the year from this team that ultimately lead to Congruity360. The founding members have proven success in both direct and indirect sales models, revenue generation, operational excellence, and strategic vendor management.

“Our solutions keep enterprise data secure, healthy, and agile, exposing reliable data sets that empower businesses to make intelligent decisions.”