Defending your organization from illegal data's wrath
In today's interconnected world, businesses not only grapple with the management of vast amounts of data but also face the looming threat of illegal data concealed within their digital repositories. This proliferation of illegal data presents a range of risks and challenges that organizations must confront.
Illegal data encompasses a broad spectrum of content or files that contravene laws, regulations, and/or company policy. It includes materials such as pirated software, confidential information obtained through unlawful means, and content that promotes or facilitates illegal activities; as well as content that is simply not acceptable or useful on the corporate network such as holiday videos and cat pics.
The dark data challenge
It is estimated that by 2025, the annual global data consumption will amount to 181 zettabytes -- over ten times more than in 2015. Does it mean we will make ten times better-informed business decisions? Most likely not, and the reason is simple: according to different sources, 75 percent or more of the data companies collect lurks in the dark.
'Dark data' is the vast amount of information collected by businesses but never analyzed or used. It can be web and app logs, email correspondence, visitor tracking data, the information generated by IoT devices, etc. Nowadays, every business activity is recorded somehow. Most of this data is unstructured and gathered in different formats. This cornucopia of information has to be processed, stored, secured, and maintained. Instead of increasing ROI, it increases noise, hidden costs, and safety issues since companies are legally responsible for all the collected data, even if they don’t use it.
Businesses struggle with high levels of 'dark data'
In a new survey 42 percent of respondents say at least half of their data is 'dark data' -- retained by the organization, but never used.
The study from Quest Software, in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), highlights the top challenges and innovations in data governance, data management and DataOps.
Is dark data valuable?
A tsunami of dark data is coming -- data that has never been analyzed, tagged, classified, organized, evaluated, used to predict future states, control other processes or has been put up for sale for others to use. So, what do we do with this data? First, we have to understand that exponentially more is coming. We see this in autonomous technology as vehicles generate four thousand gigabytes per day.
Also data is becoming more complex, as most of it is already in in video or other complicated forms. Seemingly free storage is encouraging people to store more and defer deletion.
