In today’s information age, it is indisputable that data should be treated as a financial asset.  In a recent survey of 1,300 business and IT leaders within multiple industry verticals across the globe,  76% of respondents agreed that organizations that best leverage data will win in the marketplace.  However, many fail to properly assess or understand their enterprise’s dark data.  Globally, 60% of companies consider at least 50% or more of their enterprise data to be “dark” and a lack of capability to properly assess and understand these massive data sets not only means these enterprises are not tapping into this asset’s inherent value, but it also means they lack an understanding of the costs and potential risks this data can pose to their business.  As unstructured data will become even more essential to drive forward important business objectives, such as developing AI solutions, the time is now to begin understanding and making decisions about your data.

The advent of data breaches and data subject rights has brought along significant data privacy regulations such as GDPR & CCPA, which have given regulators authority to fine business millions for data impropriety.  In addition to these potential fines and penalties, the obligation to fulfill data subject access requests [DSARs] creates an operational burden to identify, cleanse, and produce data on-demand to consumers and ex-employees, and many organizations simply lack the capability to meet this demand with any degree of operational efficiency.  All the while, enterprise data is doubling every two years, meaning that organizations that fail to take control of this data explosion now will only make things more complex and difficult for themselves down the road.

Data Detect will be the catalyst for your business’s ability to meet these data compliance demands by shining a light on your dark data, and allowing you to search, discover, and govern that data to meet business objectives, address the operational burdens of data compliance obligations, and truly transform your dark data into a competitive advantage, rather than an underutilized asset.  Here are the top six ways customers today are leveraging Data Detect to unleash the power of their enterprise data…

Compliance Data Remediation & Assessment

New data compliance mandates such as GDPR promote data minimization, and industry experts estimate that roughly 70-80% of enterprise dark data is redundant, obsolete, or trivial – so why assume the risk, effort, and burden required to store and maintain it?  With Data Detect, we offer a wide range of value-added programs – Data Assessment, Data Privacy, Data Remediation, & Data Identity and Profiling – meaning that no matter your requirements or objectives, we provide the right mix of technology and collaborative expertise to make your dark data dreams a reality, and prevent data headaches from ever complicating your day.

Pre-Migration Data Cleansing

When you move from one home to another, you always take time to get rid of the junk – so why would you not do this when moving from on-premises to the cloud?  Intelligently reducing the amount of data you migrate is the most expedient, cost-effective, and secure means of adopting cloud-based technologies, and Data Detect allows you to do so with confidence by allowing you to identify and delete irrelevant or unwanted data from your migration strategy, especially for those who want to migrate to Microsoft Azure and 365.  If you are migrating to 365, call us today for a free migration planning workshop to see how Data Detect will accelerate your migration to the cloud.

Streamlined Contract Compliance Review & Salesforce Connector

Coupled with the Salesforce Connector capabilities provided by our PremCloud Connect, Data Detect is uniquely equipped to provide an optic and analytics into the entirety of your organization’s contractual terms and obligations.  By providing customizable profiling, dashboards, and federated keyword search across all contracts or sales agreements, Data Detect has helped our customers to identify areas of data privacy and other business risks which they were unaware of and empowered their compliance teams to take corrective action.

Artificial Intelligence & Data Monetization

The development of proprietary AI solutions is already helping thousands of businesses improve their decision making and process efficiency, yet only 12% of enterprises today are using AI to help guide business strategy.  For the vast majority of businesses who have yet to begin their AI journey, ensuring that you have quality data sets to build logic and influence decision making will dictate your success [or lack thereof] from Day One of your AI journey onward.  By performing analytics and delivering capability to collect only the most relevant content for AI projects, Data Detect helps development teams build AI solutions with confidence, by knowing that only the most accurate and sophisticated data will influence their AI’s decision making. In doing so, Data Detect will improve your organization’s business outcomes, and overall capability to monetize your dark data.

eDiscovery, DSAR Fulfillment, and Actionable Enterprise Search

With decades of experience supporting enterprise eDiscovery and search with our world-class EAS archive, UGA is a market-leader in eDiscovery, and we have applied that expertise to Data Detect, while also allowing you to immediately act on that data by deleting, encrypting, or copying to a secure location.  With Data Detect’s actionable eDiscovery, organizations have been able to reduce their data collection, file discovery, and DSAR fulfillment processing timelines from days to hours, allowing them to spend more time and money analyzing data, building winning cases, and fulfilling data requests instead of just collecting information.

Mergers and Acquisitions – Data Mapping & Profiling

When companies undergo M&A activity, they are also acquiring a wealth of new data and need to make decisions on how to best consolidate applications and the information within them.  By illuminating the data worth keeping, and providing the actionable capability required to consolidate the data estate, Data Detect helps to streamline the integration of systems and information, while paving the way for efficient, intelligent, and compliant retirement of legacy applications.

This is also extremely important during the due diligence process, as unknown risks and problems may lie within the dark data of the company you are acquiring or merging with.  Via its sophisticated blend of rapid search and data analytics capabilities, Data Detect can quickly call attention to potential areas of undue risk, and call attention to potential issues before they become major business problems and headaches. ​

How Do I Get Started?

34% of organizations polled cited a lack of resources and relevant skill sets, and 23% of respondents cited lack of control over data-generation, as significant obstacles to them acting upon their dark data.  By profiling, assessing, and presenting your dark data in customizable formats and analytics dashboards Data Detect provides the insights, confidence, and capability your enterprise needs to get started on your data-driven journey.  As users rapidly search and identify dark data relevant to their job or task, they can quickly move, copy, or delete that data, and do so with confidence as Data Detect is powered by PremCloud, the data consultants and technical advisors who add value by providing guidance and confidence every step of the way.  By combining the capabilities of Data Detect with this boutique, consultative approach, we collaborate with you to establish a path to data dominance rather than a point-in-time assessment activity.

For many data privacy assessment consultancies, establishing a client’s data risk profile is an integral component of the assessment process.  This data profile is typically generated through a sample of the client’s data stores or through questionnaires sent to the owners of those respective data stores.  While there are instances when these approaches may suffice, increasing regulatory scrutiny and data privacy enforcement ask the question:  Is performing a sample good enough?  

DLA Piper’s recently published GDPR Data Breach Survey indicates that regulatory fines have surpassed $126 million since the GDPR was implemented in May of 2018.  These fines have increased in size and frequency in the past year as data protection authorities appear to be cutting organizations less slack.

How can you move past a “good enough” data sample to a holistic review of your client’s data profile?  The answer is Data Detect. 

Shine a Light on Unstructured Data

Data Detect has been created to shine a light on unstructured data repositories for dark data discovery and file analysis.  Data Detect delivers understanding, analysis, management, and the ability to take action on your clients’ data.  As organizations struggle to make decisions about what to do with these data stores, Data Detect provides critical answers for enterprises to take control of their data, mitigate their risk, and maximize data value.

The Data Detect Data Discovery and Privacy Program will extend further value to your clients and increase your revenues at each of these clients through a subscription-based service.  You can generate revenue through one or multiple of the following models:

1. Data Remediation.  Identify and take action on irrelevant data, addressing data minimization requirements of the GDPR.
2. Data Profiling.  Identify sensitive content and assess the security controls of where the content resides.
3. Data Privacy.  Two-step process combing steps 1 and 2 above.

Understand Your Data

There are a number of applicable use-cases for Data Detect.  For starters, Data Detect delivers understanding.  It is impossible to make informed decisions without an accurate analysis of what data resides within these dark repositories or what risk your clients may be exposed to.  Data Detect delivers comprehensive visibility into all of your clients’ enterprise-wide data repositories by profiling all of the content.  Through this profiling, it will categorize data as non-business critical, business-critical, and sensitive.

• Identify and eliminate non-critical Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial [ROT] to increase the value of your client’s enterprise-wide data for long term retention.
• Locate all Personally Identifiable Information [PII] in your client’s IT landscape to comply with Data Subject Access requests [DSAR’s] and properly categorize data under the GDPR.

Beyond improved data quality and decision-making, Data Detect can also be used by companies actively engaged in mergers and acquisitions.  Due diligence extends beyond the numbers.  Companies need to ensure they are not taking on undue data risks from companies they are targeting to acquire.  Data Detect can be a critical component of their due diligence program by assessing the data governance posture of a target company. Furthermore, they can streamline their system integrations by only integrating data that provide long-term value.