The data mountain as a challenge for companies

The database and thus the storage volume in German companies are constantly increasing ...! Why is this a problem and what can you do about it?

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Many employees in German companies constantly and diligently store more and more data to meet either individual needs or internal or legal requirements. The associated "we-save-everything-mentality" is increasingly becoming an (underestimated) problem and creates ever-increasing amounts of data. These, in turn, are less of a technical storage problem than a classification and behavioral problem. The negative effects of the explosive increase in data volumes have so far not been sufficiently recognized in the management levels of many German companies.

The data mountain

Even the erroneous assumption that the transition to cloud storage brings relief and data storage is always cheaper or even free, lets employees even more carelessly deal with data and their storage. In addition, employees are increasingly storing private information such as photos (57%), personal documents (51%), and unauthorized software (23%) in the workplace on the corporate network.

For companies that ignore the growing data mining, this has far-reaching consequences. Finding the right data and the right file costs the individual employee more and more valuable working time and lets companies waste billions of euros through inefficient work. The costs associated with increased IT and administrative and staffing costs could be better spent on other investments.

With about 66%, Germany has the highest dark data rate in Europe.

The data mount is made up of three groups of data:

Mission Critical Data - This is the data that is considered critical to the continued operational success of the business. Business-critical data must be protected and actively managed.

Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial Data - These redundant, obsolete, trivial (ROT) data consist of redundant data that exists multiple times, outdated data that is no longer of business value, and trivial data that has little or no utility for the company. RED data must be reduced as much as possible by regularly erasing it in a secure manner.

Dark Data - This is the data whose value is not yet known. They can contain both critical mission-critical data and useless ROT data. In both cases, they consume resources. We need to investigate Dark Data as soon as possible and classify it as either RED or mission critical.

Three behaviors lead to more dark data, drive up operating costs and can lead to unacceptable risks in today's businesses.

At the strategic level
IT strategies and budgets that are based solely on data volume, not business value

At the corporate level
The introduction of more and more cloud applications and storage under the false assumption that this is "free storage"

At an individual level
Employees who believe that the Company's IT resources can be used free of charge, both for business and personal use.

Data mountains are not negative in themselves. However, only when properly managed will the mission-critical data be protected and waste reduced to a minimum.

How to regain control of the unstructured mountains of data?

In the future, data will generally need to be classified according to a company's retention policy, rather than individually based on confidentiality, project or type. But even more important is to establish an actionable information governance strategy for dark data in companies.

See what is hidden to others
Identify the value, risks and costs of your data

  • Bring Dark Data to Light! Where is the relevant data? What are data without known utility?
  • Create guidelines to classify, store, or delete data in compliance with the law.
  • Delete ROT data regularly according to internally defined IT guidelines!
  • Make your employees aware of the topic and motivate them to actively maintain and save their data according to defined principles and to manage them responsibly.
  • Define a viable information governance strategy that is supported by senior management to drive policy-driven user behavior and reduce risk.

 

What else can you do in your company?
  • Ensure orderly directory and rights structures on your file servers!
  • Use migRavento first show you the effective access rights on your file server. These can then be automatically adjusted and individually adjusted using drag & drop. With the free trial version, all functions related to the visualization and planning of access rights can be used.
  • If you are not sure that your permissions will really meet your security needs, then you should contact our Authority Workshop participate in the topic of file server permissions.
  • Run a data and authorization management solution such as tenfold to be able to constantly manage, monitor and adapt your system. Daily work with practical workflows saves time, costs and reduces security risks.

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