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John Bottega, President, EDM Council, and Mike Meriton, co-founder and COO of the EDM Council, talk with Tim Brooks, Managing Director, World Wide Technology, about the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council initiation and journey so far. EDM Council is a non-profit trade association founded in 2005 with a dedicated mission to support and advocate for data professionals through a combination of standards and best practices. Today, it is a global organization with nearly 300 companies and 10,000 professionals.
They shared what cloud data management capabilities solve and how the entire structure started working. The objective of this model was to amalgamate best practices in the implementation migration and then support data in the cloud, protecting sensitive data and controlling access. They highlighted the positive herd mentality in this domain as everybody wants to move to the cloud. However, it requires a pretty good knowledge of implementing an effective cloud environment.
Cloud is a powerful capability; its wider use can be seen, but what is often ignored is that it introduces risk if done incorrectly. This model helps organizations know how to effectively create this environment and do it in a responsible and trusted manner. So that when data goes to the cloud, the organization has confidence that data is curated, protected, and used appropriately.
EDM Council framework began in March 2020 and renowned companies in the market approached the council. They were working together to build a set of principles for trusted cloud adoption based on ideas around establishing a control framework around data risk. The idea was, instead of individual companies building different frameworks one at a time, “why don’t we get a group of companies to work together to build a common playbook? And hence this [cloud data management capabilities] CDMC framework,” said EDM Council Executives. The council thought 10 or 15 companies would be ideal to start.
However, in just 60 days, over 100 companies and 300 professionals came on board to help develop CDMC framework. After a year and a half of brainstorming and effort during the pandemic, that is, 750 meetings and 45,000 man-hours, which is about 25 person-years altogether, this CDMC framework was developed and published on the 28th of September, 2021. Companies that often compete, like the top four cloud companies worldwide — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM — all got involved. Each of these companies contributed about half a dozen engineers into multiple meetings per week to build out a comprehensive framework that is about 165 pages long and features 14 key controls that should always be on for protecting sensitive data in cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud implementations. The framework has almost everything needed for good data management in the cloud, yet it allows each company to have their own ingenuity in how they meet that requirement.