Better governance is crucial to getting value from data

Data is increasingly one of the most valuable resources that businesses have, but extracting that value requires effective management of content.

A new survey from Rocket Software of more than 500 corporate IT professionals across multiple industries in the US, UK and APAC regions shows that business data is still vastly unstructured with 81 percent of respondents indicating that at least some of their data is considered 'dark'.

Once organizations embark on a journey to manage their data, security rightly becomes the top concern, but respondents note other features that would significantly improve their content management including the ability to apply automation and rules-based redaction (full or partial) to protect sensitive data (62 percent), the ability to manage content types regardless of size or origin (61 percent), having a single view of content from across multiple, disparate repositories, databases and file systems (61 percent) and the ability to access content anywhere, anytime on any device (60 percent).

Among respondents from larger organizations with 1,000-4,999 employees, 81 percent say they would gain a competitive advantage if their organization's current processes relating to information security and compliance could be automated.

"Failure to effectively manage content poses a great risk to organizations not prepared to handle vast amounts of data, which must be handled in a secure and compliant manner," says Chris Wey, president, data modernization at Rocket Software. "Organizations need to at once be able to reap the most value from their data and ensure they are compliant with the ever-changing regulatory market -- robust content management solutions are the answer."

Among other findings, 74 percent of respondents have a hybrid approach with data both in house and in the cloud, which means content management must be compatible with legacy systems. There are also insider worries, with 37 percent of respondents saying employees saving content on shared- and personal drives presents the greatest challenge to their company's ability to manage content successfully.

The full report is available from the Rocket site.

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