Data discovery is the fundamental process that underpins all information governance, data protection, and information security practices
How do you value, manage and apply your data?
Is data important to your organisation?
Do you know exactly what data you have, where all your data is, and why you have it?
Data is essential to the function of organisations.
We generate, use and store more data than at any time in human history.
Like all critical business assets, it’s imperative that you protect and manage your data appropriately. So, you must establish:
- What information do you hold?
- What types of information are most valuable?
- Where is all your information kept?
- What is the purpose of all the information you hold?
Data discovery will help you answer these questions.
Data is changing
Data growth is inevitable. But it's not just increasing volume...
Increasing data volume is real and very significant. Most organisations have experienced constant growth in volume over the past few years, and most expect this to continue.
But that’s not the whole picture.
There's more variety in data types and locations
- Both structured data and the harder to manage, unstructured data are growing fast.
- Data types are increasing too, with images, video, and recordings growing fastest; messaging and email are proliferating, and all of these leading to larger and more complex backup and archiving systems.
- And the remote working boom means that your data can be spread across many devices, applications and repositories.
Data discovery helps you to understand and take control.
The costs and risks of data
Data storage and management costs are significant.
Careful management is required to control risks.
Growing data volume is driving ever-increasing costs. Left unchecked, these costs will escalate causing financial pain. So it’s essential to have a strategy to manage data volumes and control the associated costs.
Meanwhile, the established risks of storing and managing data are amplified by the growth and diversity of the data you hold.
- Documents and emails may contain privileged, confidential and sensitive data
- Privacy and data protection risks escalate as we control more data
- Increasing unstructured data is harder to analyse and to mitigate risks
Data discovery informs your strategic decisions on cost control and risk management.
Supporting your data initiatives
Organisations are looking for ways to improve data management.
Initiatives include:
- Reducing the overall volume of data
- Finding new ways to use data, to generate more value
- Better understanding of all your data
These are all sensible goals, which you may be considering, too. Our experience and research tell us that these projects can be very challenging, and many of them fail.
Data discovery provides the ideal platform for successful data initiatives.
Unstructured data - challenges and opportunities
Unstructured data is fast-growing, and constantly evolving; new formats and platforms mean new data management challenges.
Unstructured data includes documents, email and messaging, images and video, social media – almost anything that is not in a database.
Without the right approach and tools, it can be very difficult to fully and efficiently understand what meaningful content is hidden in your unstructured data.
Opportunity: Unstructured data can be a goldmine for marketing intelligence or may contain useful information that can save costs elsewhere.
Risk: Your unstructured data might contain information that represents a potential risk to the organisation.
This presents a few issues:
- How do you detect and produce useful and valuable data – and avoid deleting it?
- How do you find and protect risky content, sensitive data and regulated information?
It’s clearly important to get an understanding of your unstructured data. But, getting to grips with unstructured data requires special skills, and this presents another challenge:
- In many organisations, there is no one with direct responsibility for managing unstructured data.
Data discovery is essential to uncovering the content and value of unstructured data.
Your data is a moving target
External factors present new data management demands
Prominent recent examples are Brexit and COVID-19. Recent research (see link below), tell us that:
- COVID-19 is having a huge impact on data strategies.
Think: Remote working, personal devices, new apps, local data storage and loosened information governance. - Brexit is also affecting data strategies for most organisations.
Think: Increased administration, new documentation and systems, cross-border data access, increased compliance burden and multiple regulations.
Data discovery works as an ongoing measure to monitor and respond to external factors.
Download the paper: Data Discovery Insights
A research paper based on an independent survey of over 100 senior IT professionals
In early 2021, Oyster IMS commissioned a survey of over 100 senior IT professionals, to understand their views on the changing landscape of data storage usage and protection.
