Are You Managing the Unknown?

We are told that data is the new oil, high value, it will enable our companies to make better decisions and faster. But what if a company doesn't really know what data they have or where it is, it's no longer the high value oil well, it's a leaky engine, that, if not addressed, may cost thousands to fix. 

Deep within your company's is a pool of data that you know is there, growing, swallowing up your storage but you can't bring yourself to address it. It has grown over many years.

The cost of a GB of data has fallen from one million pounds to pennies over the last fifty years and many companies feel they can now store everything, taking the approach that "it's better to save something that we don't need rather than delete something we do". This approach is not competence or compliance, it is complacency; data has value, data also has risk.

Up to 80% of a company's data is unstructured and while unstructured data is not new, it is now coming from sources that were not considered an issue ten years ago. Traditionally, unstructured data stores were made up of text document and other file types, such as photos and audio but now it is coming from sources outside the organisation, such as in the form of social media data, real-time streaming data from IoT ‘smart’ devices or geographic data and search engine queries, so many other kinds, with new types coming online every day. You can no longer afford to ignore this data as it is already starting to get out of control and the problem is only going to get worse.

Across your company every department is storing data, they need it to do their jobs, they don't manage it, they create it and forget about it once they have stopped using it. This means that even in the most organised of companies there is duplicate data, data that should be archived and whole swathes of data that has no value to the company that could be deleted.

If, for example, a marketing team collects data as a part of campaign, once they have finished with it they will not delete it. This data may hold personally identifiable data, as defined by GDPR, but it might be stored in a users local drive rather than in a controlled manner. This risk is obvious to you but it isn't to the marketer who has forgotten all about it. How many times does this happen every week in the departments in your business?

GDPR forced many companies to face up to the growing problem of uncontrolled data but many focused purely on what they needed to do to be compliant rather than auditing all the data that they were storing. Why? The simple reason was that it was too much work and this is why those companies have that growing pool of unstructured data that remains unaddressed. What is stored is unknown, whether it needs to be kept is unknown and in some instances its very existence is unknown. How can a company manage their data if so much of it is unknown? 

It doesn't have to be such a problem, in fact it can be easily addressed without having to resort to multiple tools and manual processes. SCC’s ManageSMART Information Intelligence service gives a business full visibility of their data right across all their data stores. It will turn data into information and ultimately intelligence.

In a time where the volumes of data storage is about to grow, lack of visibility will lead to increased unnecessary cost and non-compliance. That is not an option.

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