There’s a scene in the animated movie “Ratatouille” in which the lead character swipes some important papers off a desk and is chased all over Paris by the antagonist. In typical Pixar fashion, the adventure tickled my cold-ridden 7-year-old to no end. But what got me was the pursuer’s recurring French-accented shouts of “my duck-u-monts, my duck-u-monts!” – and his unwitting reminder of how important it is to focus hard on security when pursuing an information management strategy.
This seemingly obvious statement is worth reviewing because it is not always clear that the issue does not take care of itself.
Most folks take it on faith that the leading software solutions do a good job of securing whatever content they manage, and they’re right, by and large. But it’s not enough to leave it there because no system operates in a vacuum, and as soon as you talk about having one system touch another, you immediately run into your organization’s general security mechanisms and the need to be vetted by IT to ensure seamless interoperability and protection.
Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom, this interaction needn’t be a bad thing. For sure, nothing is more important to IT than maintaining the integrity of the overall infrastructure, and nothing will be added to that infrastructure without serious scrutiny. But at the same time, content managers ought to seek every opportunity to make their users’ lives easier. And if that scrutiny enables them to leverage single-sign-on and other enterprise measures that can simplify the user experience, they should be all for it.
In the movie, the two characters eventually learn to co-exist as the greater good eventually bubbles to the surface. Here’s hoping the same happens for you, and that your “duck-u-monts” can be secured without having to cut to a chase.
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