Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 09 | Page 97

/////////////////////////////////////////////////// t cht lk BRINGING VISIBILITY TO THE ISSUE OF WEB DATA BLOAT Data management is crucial for performance accuracy and security and can have a negative impact on a system if not handled correctly. Francesco Giarletta, CEO of Avanite, examines the potential security issues that simple web browsing data can cause and how web data bloat can be reduced. W henever a user visits a website, data is created, downloaded and stored. Some of this data is useful; it enables us to get the rich browsing experience we expect from the sites we visit. But as websites and web applications become increasingly connected and complex, the amount of browsing data also grows, quickly reaching a point where computer performance is impacted. What's more, that data in browsing databases can include highly sensitive information, putting organisations’ security at risk. Of course, the issue of the web data is as old as the Internet itself, so it would be www.intelligentcio.com perfectly reasonable to question why this is now an issue. So how and why has the web browsing data problem evolved into not only a potential risk to IT performance, but also organisations’ privacy? Inconvenience to impacting performance While web data has always been a potential inconvenience to users and organisations, it started to become a bigger problem when Microsoft introduced Windows 8.0 and Internet Explorer 10. At this point, the computing behemoth introduced the webcachev01.dat database, “ WHAT IS NEEDED IS A SOLUTION THAT COMPLETELY MANAGES ALL ASPECTS OF WEB DATA, OFFERING ORGANISATIONS THE OPPORTUNITY TO STRIKE A BALANCE WHICH BEST SUITS THEIR SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS. INTELLIGENTCIO 97