Holistic is a term that refers to something that’s concerned with complete systems or organisms, rather than just focusing on a part of it. Traditional security mechanisms have often focused on narrowly defined threats and have compartmentalized risks, taking on risk management techniques and technologies after the fact. A holistic approach involves building data risk management into business systems and processes and making data risk management more transparent. IBM has published a whitepaper highlighting how this can be done.
You can download it in PDF format here:
http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/rlw03001usen/RLW03001USEN.PDF