Tackling the dark data menace

Soma Tah

Companies these days are looking for innovative ways to garner meaningful insights from their data so that they can make more informed decisions and serve their customers better.

But they struggle to get the visibility into their data which are dispersed across on-premises, hybrid and complex multi-cloud environments. Along with that, data migration, protection of the data, meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, as well as the cost of managing all these, can be very challenging for them. 

And with the advent of the multi-cloud era, the most compelling challenge is how do you protect data to the cloud, in the cloud, and between the cloud.

Another concern is the growing volume of 'dark data' within the organizations resulting primarily from a predominant data hoarding culture across the organizations. These are the data organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but fail to monetize them or use them for any business advantage. The organizations often retain dark data for compliance purposes also.

But storing and securing data eat up a lot of their budget, and sometimes expose them to greater risks than value. For the average midsize organization holding 1000TB of data- the cost to store their non-critical information is estimated at more than $650,000 annually, according to the Global Databerg Report by Veritas. The report further reveals that only 15pc of enterprise data is clean or contain business-critical information. Around 52pc of the enterprise data is dark data and 33pc data is considered redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT). If not dealt with, by the year 2020, managing these data will cost organizations $3.3 trillion.

Balaji Rao, MD, India and SAARC, Veritas said, "On an average 80pc of the data stored by businesses is useless because either the organizations don’t know what to do with that data or they are simply legacy data. As all these data lie in the expensive storage systems and 60pc of their budget goes to storage management, hence the ability to clean them up would free them a lot of money and will bring in a lot more efficiency and other benefits unforeseen by the businesses so far.”

The growing volume of unstructured data is also a challenge for the businesses, as it exposes them to greater risks and makes them vulnerable to unknown breach or attack scenarios.

Marcus Loh, Senior Director for Technology Practice, Asia-Pacific & Japan said, "The biggest risk for the enterprises today that they do not know where their sensitive data is residing. We found out that 85pc of the enterprise data is irrelevant and hence, we give them enough visibility into their data to help them make informed decisions about all of the data they store and ensure they are best positioned to counter any data breach or security risk."