The Client’s Challenge
A newly appointed CIO was stepping into his role with the goal of starting a retention and governance journey for the organization. In order to do this, he needed to understand what his entire data landscape looked like, identify gaps, prioritize where to focus, and develop a plan for execution. He also needed to make his case to the board and and get the budget to support his plans.
The Solution Delivered
Instant Insights analyzed a subset of unstructured data, specifically a file share that most within the organization felt was mission critical, but no one could confidently say what was on it. Within 48 hours, Instant Insights analyzed the file and folder-level properties and delivered an evidence package summarizing the findings to the CIO.
The evidence package (shown below) highlighted areas of concern and opportunities for improvement – providing the CIO representative data points to help inform his governance plans and allowing him to make a data-backed presentation to the board to request the supporting budget.
Click on the slideshow below to view the Instant Insights findings:
The Recommended Action Plan
Based on the results uncovered from Instant Insights analysis of subset of the organization’s data, we recommended a phased approach that would make immediate impact along with longer-term plans to maintain ongoing data management and governance best practices.
The cost savings realized from the recommended data clean up will help fund the rest of the project, while reducing the size of the dataset before performing the full content-level analysis accelerates timelines to remediation.
Clean Up Unnecessary Data
Run analysis against the full data footprint to get a true understanding of the entire data set. Pick an acceptable starting point for soft-deleting all data older than X number of years. Move obsolete data to cheaper storage which generally reduces storage costs by 50% and quarantines the attack footprint.
Mitigate Risk
At the metadata level, 4% of the data set contained risk indicators – typically we find that number is 5-10x more after full content analysis. Here we would move on to that full content-level analysis of the data for a true understanding of the full risk profile and risk exposure.
Implement Data Retention Practices
Here we would work with each business unit to set acceptable policies for their respective departments and integrate retention practices across the organization via our CDM Hub and automated processes.
