Josef Villa
Head of Information Security & Compliance at S&T

Josef Villa is responsible for the strategic focus of this business consulting segment, implementation of the go-to-market model in the S&T countries and developing the necessary skills among S&T’s IT security specialists.
Josef Villa holds a Master degree from the Vienna University of Economics and brings many years of management experience to his new position. He was most recently Territory Sales Manager at the EMC Software Group and has also served as Sales Manager at Borland Austria and as Sales Manager Northern Europe for Evidian in Amsterdam. Before he was Member of the Management Board at Bull AG.


Data Classification: How to regain control over growing data quantities and comply with privacy obligations?
The central purpose of a Data Classification is the fact, that different kinds of data and information require different performance and service levels, protective measures, retention policies and recovery speed.
In contrast to a common categorization of information (structured - meaning databases, semi -structured – meaning e-mail and unstructured – meaning user generated files) many companies keep their main focus on mission-critical data, some attention on e-mail system and few attention on “other data”.
This “no-focus-area” represents up to 80% of total data and - in addition - the fastest growing segment. As the view “delete older than….” or “delete unattached longer than….” does not work under retention rules the volume of unmanaged data dramatically increased, widening backup and recovery time slots in proportion of their growth rate but disproportional to the information value.
But how to establish a policy based system to keep all considerations in balance?
Data Classification first defines the relevant axes (Regulation Compliance, Data Privacy, Availability, Recoverability, and Retention) and within an axe the relevant parameters.
Together with the owner of the data the classification is exercised by templates and consolidated to a meaningful scoreboard. This multiple view on data and their classes enables the definition of policies, covering all dimensions of data control and optimization.
But how about these huge numbers of unmanaged user created files? Taxonomy driven solutions and management-backed policies for rich media files restore and establish control on “other data”.
Spotlighting the security aspects, the scoreboard shows the defined hierarchical classes of confidentiality as subset of this analysis and delivers valuable information where to implement data segmentation, encryption leveled authentication and necessary log file monitoring and auditing.
This model embeds information security into a wider context of considerations which leads to multi-dimensional view of data, policies and optimizes underlying investments.