Omnissa delivers a peek into the benefits of breaking through enterprise data silos

When Omnissa this week rolled out a new AI governance authority product, Elara, in beta, it delivered a glimpse into the potential of having visibility between the typical enterprise’s data silos, whether they’re in lines of business, disparate geographies, or corporate operational units.

“By connecting signals across systems that often operate independently, Elara gives IT and security leaders greater context into how their digital work tools, including AI apps, models and agents, are being used across their environment, and the ability to apply policies and controls based on broader business context,” the vendor, formerly a unit of VMware, said in its announcement, noting that many existing tools are limited to authorizing actions within the systems they manage.

“Elara is designed to sit above these tools, connecting the systems that customers already run and giving organizations broader context without requiring them to standardize on a single technology stack,” it said. 

Brian Link, product CTO for Elara, offered a hypothetical example that illustrated the potential of cross-silo data sharing, which enterprise CIOs have seen as a data Holy Grail for decades.

If someone in cybersecurity needs to, for example, push an urgent OS update to global retail tablets to address a newly-discovered vulnerability, he said, Elara could consult multiple data sources across the organization to properly evaluate the risks and advise whether the update should happen at that time.

“Elara knows those stores are in an active change freeze (due to) inventory count, and that these are the same iPads running the inventory application,” Link said. “It pulls that freeze from ServiceNow, so the approver sees it before deciding. The decision stops being only a security call and becomes a business trade-off. Before anyone approves, Elara shows the blast radius: the devices, users, and services the change would touch, plus the events the approval would trigger. Only then does the human decide.”

Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research, agreed with Link that cutting through the data visibility limits caused by enterprise silos has tremendous potential. But he also stressed the logistical challenges, given how tightly many enterprise LOB executives limit access to their unit’s information.

“A security patch colliding with an inventory freeze is not a technology problem. It is a business trade-off. The person approving the change should see both sides before deciding. The example is strong, and the [corporate] politics raised may be its Achilles’ heel,” Dickson said. “Omnissa’s natural territory is the endpoint, which is one silo, and the security, network, legal, and finance teams have no particular reason to treat it as the referee.”

But, he argued, this scenario can only occur if the information happens to appear in the very limited number of places where Omnissa can access data. It doesn’t break down those data silos as much as it enjoys tiny cracks of visibility between some of them.

“This is Omnissa’s scenario for a product that is still in beta. It is not a customer result. But Elara only knows about the freeze because someone recorded it in ServiceNow,” Dickson said. “The context is only as good as the systems it comes from; if the freeze lives in a regional manager’s inbox, Elara never sees it.”

But rollouts of products like this might get the data silo conversations renewed, which could be a good thing.

“An umpire is useless if the two teams never agreed on the strike zone,” Dickson said. “Elara can call balls and strikes all day, but someone above the CISO and the head of store operations has to define the zone first. That is why vendor clearance matters; every connector is a permission, and every permission is a negotiation with whoever owns that silo: the CISO, network operations, Legal, the CFO’s office or a regional business unit.”

He pointed out, “Elara does not just watch. It can block or limit actions, so the ask is bigger than read access. A single control point across every silo is also a single point of failure, the keys to the kingdom if you will.  A CISO would be right to scrutinize it hard.” And, he noted, CIOs cannot grant access to data that their teams don’t control.

Link acknowledged the challenge, and said that the critical enterprise element is somehow bringing in previously unavailable context, “but we are reliant on people [in IT] bringing those pieces of the puzzle to us.”

He said that his team is trying to address the question of ‘What do you do when that context no longer lives inside a person’s head?’ “Right now, I don’t see anyone else trying to do that.”

This article originally appeared on Computerworld.