Defusing the Unstructured Data Time Bomb

Unstructured data is growing at an unprecedented rate and enterprise organizations are struggling to keep up. However, there are many tools available that can help administrators apply structure to the unstructured world and mitigate potential risks, reign in spiraling costs, and maintain regulatory compliance, according to this report from sister site ServerWatch.

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“Unstructured data can damage your organization's business operations and lead to spiraling storage costs. If that is not bad enough, it also represents a regulatory compliance time bomb that could explode at any time with serious consequences.

“Unstructured data is best defined by looking at its opposite: Structured data that is stored in a repository like a database with rules governing data types, values and even where the data should be stored. Unstructured data, on the other hand, is everything else: The mass of spreadsheets, documents, presentations, images and other files that employees generate every day, store on corporate file servers and SharePoint servers, and share with people both within and outside the organization. Often, this data is simply ignored or forgotten about when it is no longer needed. Thus, it may continue to be stored indefinitely. As a result, most organizations have a great deal of unstructured data: Roughly 80 percent of all corporate data is unstructured, according to Gartner.

“If you think about the type of information contained in all of these spreadsheets, documents and other files, it is highly likely that some of them will contain confidential corporate information such as pricing, designs and legal documents, as well as personal details about staff and customer records. Losing some of this information through accidental deletion could harm your business, while unauthorized access could leave companies in breach of Sarbanes-Oxley or other financial, data protection or health care compliance regulations.

“To help deal with this challenge, data governance products that automate this process have been developed by companies including Siperian (now part of Informatica,) IBM and Varonis Systems. ‘The problem that many organizations face is how do you govern access to all this data efficiently? If you try and do it manually there's no way that you can figure out who is using it, whether it is being used properly, and how you can reduce access to data to just those who need it,’ David Gibson, Varonis' director of technical services, told ServerWatch.

“To do this you must know if each individual file stored on your servers is still needed and, if so, who must access it, who can access it, and who is actually accessing it. Permissions are seldom revoked in practice, so files tend to be accessible by people long after they cease needing to access them, Gibson said. This can lead to serious compliance problems.”

For more, read "The Importance of Managing Unstructured Data" at ServerWatch.

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