Business challenge
Our client, a large social housing provider in the North of England, has embarked upon a mission to improve the management of their unstructured data assets. Following a merger, there were two sets of Office 365 SharePoint, OneDrive and on-premises shared drive assets, with a total size in excess of 8TB (6 million files). Their mid-term ambition is to consolidate all of their unstructured data assets into a single cloud data asset.
There was a widely held supposition that the data had not been managed for many years, data retention and minimisation policies had not been applied and there was concern that future data growth would present an even greater data protection risk and further investment (cost) in storage. In short, the client needed to understand their data to help identify strategies for improvement in its management but moreover put in place the policies and procedures with effective automated policing controls to ensure their data asset would be managed sustainably in the future.
The project
We started by curating views of each of the data assets for each organisation. This involved the ingestion of meta data and text from files stored in Office 365 SharePoint sites, document libraries, OneDrive and several on-premise shared drives. Once we had the meta data we commenced our analysis using infoboss powerful search-engine based analysis tools we were able to quickly add value to the client’s understanding of their data.
The results of our assessment confirmed the organisation’s worst fears… Their unstructured data assets had not been managed for almost 40 years!
- 6 million files
- 8TB of storage
- Data estate doubling in size every 2-3 years
- Files dated back to 1979
- Over 1000 different file types (are there that many applications in existence?)
- 3TB of the data was video and image files
- Almost 300K ZIP and CSV files (considered by many to be the greatest data protection security risk)
- Some of these files dated back to 2005!
- Over 500K files contained some form of personally identifiable information
- 2K contained credit card numbers
- There appeared to be a particular issue with files over 20MB in size. Almost 2TB of these files had not been accessed in over 2 years. An even greater concern was the potential additional network surcharges associated with access and download of these files. Potentially generating an unbudgeted future cost.
- Almost 500GB of storage was associated with files where there was more than one copy.
Indeed one of these files was duplicated 61K times!
Client benefits
✓ Reduced data protection risk
✓ Reduced storage costs by up to 60%
✓ Search and browse documents
✓ Service DSARs more efficiently
✓ Monitor retention and PII minimisation policies✓ Ensure PCI DSS compliance
✓ Transform understanding and insights from their data assets
What next…
Armed with the initial set of recommendations, the client has now started work to develop strategies for addressing the issues raised. They are empowered to analyse and go deeper into specific issues, to identify fixes and procedural changes to support sustainable approaches to their data management.
They can report on progress towards their targets (after all, what gets measured gets managed) and using infoboss, have started to automate the policing of their minimisation and retention policies.
In conclusion, although the situation seemed somewhat overwhelming at first, the organisation has begun to realise the benefits of their new approach to managing their unstructured data assets.
They can see opportunity to:
- Reduce the data estate size of up to 60% along with the associated costs of storage, backup and management
- Reduce their exposure to crystallisation of data protection, data breach and GDPR non-compliance risk
- Make more efficient use of network and system resources with a related reduction in costs
- Reduce or remove requirement for application licences where files for obscure less often used applications have been removed from the data estate.
Discover how infoboss can unlock the huge potential of data management. Maximising its value and driving your business forward.
Sample data assessment.
infoboss can undertake a data assessment to determine the impact of data quality issues on your operations and revenue streams. Request a demo.
infoboss.co.uk/contact
T: 0333 772 1963
E: lduffield@infoboss.co.uk
L: www.linkedin.com/in/lee-a-duffield/
Meet infoboss
infoboss can transform businesses through the power of data.
This innovative, enterprise-wide software solution makes it simple to find, clean and enhance structured and unstructured data.
Right now, businesses have data across different sources. Not to mention outdated platforms, expensive storage, and unknown numbers of duplicate records.
Infoboss solves all these data issues, easily.
Ideal for organisations with large numbers of assets – from customer records to contracts – it takes away the clutter and confusion. All with a single, integrated data management platform. Streamlining decades of data and putting millions of files at your fingertips. Saving time and money. Making data work harder and smarter for business.
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