In the Care of Data

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a group of folks about information security and stated that as IT pros, our job is to become the custodians of data. My argument was that we’re the ones who have, in one form or another, all of the essential data for an organization. We’re the ones who are charged with keeping it secure. We determine the privacy measures. If you’ve ever heard the old cliché, “Possession is 9/10ths of the law,” then really, we are the ones that possess critical intellectual property (IP) and personally identifiable information (PII).

I thought I had made a great point during my presentation. But, I hadn’t finessed the point quite right. A couple of folks came up to me and let me know – in a very friendly, but firm way – that they weren’t custodians.

I thought the word custodian was a nice word. After all, IT pros are charged with taking care of data. That’s a cool, interesting and important job.

But they said I could make my point better if I used a different word: instead of being data custodians, they consider IT pros to be data curators or data caretakers.

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