Cleansing and building the right information governance for success

Whitepaper

Unorganised data is crippling AI. This whitepaper explores how to streamline your information governance, enabling long-term compliance and maximising your data's true potential.

14 April 202512 mins

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Cleansing and building the right information governance for success

Executive summary

Organisations are building massive information stores, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are poised to convert these troves of data into usable data outcomes that can guide actions at a more rapid pace. But today, most organisations acknowledge that they have too much information; most of which is unorganised and uncategorised, which is limiting the effectiveness of tools such as AI, thereby putting these organisations at risk. To truly take hold of their data and drive a more efficient operation, organisations need to begin by addressing their current information governance practices and data, putting strategies in place that can help streamline and automate, enabling long-term compliance and efficiency for their operations.

The data problem

It is said that information is knowledge and that knowledge is power. But conversely, information is a liability, and information is a risk. Organisations need to understand this complex balance to effectively run and protect their operations.

Between the standard transactional information that is generated through ongoing operations, such as the data contained in forms and applications, and the ancillary information that is contained in non-structured repositories such as SharePoint, OneDrive, file shares, emails, memos or even text messages, a lot of work must be done to identify and categorise this information if there is any hope of reigning in the current situation.

The risks associated with the generation and retention of information are vast. Whilst many risks are highly visible, still more lurk below the surface, potentially not making their presence known until it is too late. Both reputational and financial risks abound as data grows at its maddening pace. Unfortunately, risks scale faster than the information itself, meaning that as data stores grow, the exposure increases at a much faster rate, often outpacing the organisation’s ability to deal with it.

Whilst various organisations want to utilise all their internal information to power tools such as AI in the hopes of accelerating decision-making, if the data is not adequately cleaned up, structured, and organised, the value of the AI outputs is greatly diminished.

Ultimately, the goal for any organisation will be automating the collection, categorisation, and usage of their internal data. However, these actions demand information that exhibits consistency and repeatability to maximise their utility. Without clean, structured data, automation cannot be applied, leaving the old time- consuming manual processes in place.

Failure to address data creates risks

Too often, organisations ignore or put off dealing with their legacy data as opposed to a more realistic view as it applies to their current and future productivity and risk. Usually, this is rooted in the belief that they are secure simply because they have not experienced a data breach in the past and have not begun deploying technologies such as AI in a nod towards the future. This can create a lack of urgency around funding initiatives to address data or even simply acquiring the management buy-in for actions that need to be taken today to secure the future. However, managing information and data effectively can serve as a key driver for many strategic activities within an organisation and help to drive operational efficiency as well as reduce risk. By connecting existing strategic projects to your organisation’s information governance framework, you can demonstrate the impact of information governance efforts and how critical they are to a successful organisation.

With the exponential growth of data and the consistent neglect of data clean-up in favour of more straightforward matters, it is essential for every organisation to grasp five key considerations. These considerations will help assess past data and evaluate the risks and opportunities that lie ahead. No organisation is immune from these challenges as everyone has some degree of ‘data clutter’ to deal with daily.

Without a proper strategy for data clean-up, your organisation risks retaining information well beyond its useful life. This information then exposes the organisation to increasing risk levels (and their accompanying financial and reputational penalties) whilst creating roadblocks for implementing AI or future efficiency applications.

A better approach

Actual efforts, dramatic results

A large North American bank faced a significant challenge in managing information that their organisation had accumulated over years. More than 30 terabytes of information, now no longer relevant, created an undue level of risk for the bank, along with draining productivity for the employees who had to continue handling documents and information. Through their clean- up efforts, they were able to remove over 15 million files, streamlining their data storage requirements and setting them up for a more efficient future.

Organisations today face a multitude of challenges on the data front. Moreover, traditional tools and methods simply can’t keep pace with the dramatic rate of change that data creation, data organisation, and data usage present. There needs to be a better way to clean up what already exists today and then semi-automate data handling for the future so that innovative tools such as AI can help build a more efficient and proactive decision-making process.

1. Five key considerations for addressing your data challenges

As your organisation embarks on a journey to clean up and categorise information, the following five key considerations should guide your actions and help you to connect your information governance efforts to wider strategic goals within your organisation, helping you to secure buy-in and commitment:

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) consideration

ESG considerations run far beyond just public relations or putting on a good face on the organisation. ESG considerations can present significant legal and financial risk for organisations if not properly addressed.

Minimising data through clean-up efforts can help organisations reduce the physical storage requirements and potentially enable data centre modernisation that can result in taking older systems offline or consolidating data centre footprints. As one of the largest concentrations of power consumption in any organisation, reducing the data centre footprint can lower not only the power consumption but also CO2 that is eventually released into the atmosphere. As new technologies such as AI become more prevalent, power consumption concerns are rapidly escalating; organisations should consider the environmental impact of their current operations as they also consider the impact of expanding data services in the future.

Addressing ESG today puts organisations in a much better position to deal with sustainability in the future.

AI can have a significant environmental impact that organisations must remain cognisant of with relation to their overall ESG initiatives. For instance, to simply train generative AI (genAI) mode of ChatGPT-3, organisations will consume:

3.5 million litres of water

1.3 gigawatt-hours

121 U.S. households, power for one year

2. Getting ready for AI

Today, every organisation is being thrust into the world of AI as they all scramble to develop a strategy to address this important opportunity. As an emerging technology, AI is key to both innovation and improving business processes. Organisations that aim to run more efficient operations, better serve their customers or better assist society are keen to lean into AI to support their actions.

However, many are not considering that having an updated data strategy is equally important. The success of AI as a transformational technology is rooted in having the right information to feed that process. The adage “garbage in, garbage out” has never been more correct as AI relies on having high-quality data to operate most effectively. If an organisation cannot trust the data going into AI, there is no way to trust the output. Bias, whether intentional or accidental, can be entered into any AI model based on the input data. Therefore, clean and optimised information on the front end can help prevent the ethical or social biases that may occur.

AI has the potential to mask the decision-making process. So, it must rely on high-quality and well-structured information to drive the successful outcomes that can enable innovation and help grow organisations.

3. Minimising cyber risk

Risks to organisations, both financially and reputationally, lurk around every corner. Bad actors are looking for your data, the more you collect and store, the greater the risk. Data breaches are not a question of if, but when. Careful governance of both the types of data and their lifecycles can help remove information that is no longer relevant for your organisation but can still carry a significant amount of risk in the wrong hands.

Properly classifying, organising, and protecting data is essential to reduce the impact of a breach. Having proper strategies in place can accelerate your response, minimising the potential impact of an external incursion into your systems. Organisations with lax (or non- existent) data retention policies open themselves up for financial penalties and liability as data potentially kept outside of established systems or data with personally identifiable information (PII) may eventually be accessed by outsiders. Too often employees hold onto information far beyond its useful life, creating an unacceptable risk for the organisation, even though it has little or no visibility to the data.

4. Compliance across a complex footprint

As a global company, Iron Mountain understands the complexities of managing information worldwide. Handling compliance across a complex footprint that involves the regulations, customs and business practices of multiple locations is no small feat. So, turning to the global experts is the best place to start.

We can help with simplifying requirements to help organisations come up with a manageable governance model that not only works for their business by meeting their risk profile but also meets the requirements for every region that they operate within. Through our constant monitoring of upcoming changes in regional legislation, we can design a compliance strategy that provides long-term efficiency by understanding the various regional needs and then applying the right processes to meet these regulations.

When your teams can operate with the confidence that the system is checking their actions and applying the proper data governance, they can work in a more productive and efficient manner. With no second guessing about retention, handling, categorising, or accessing data, employees can focus on the task and hand and not get mired down in the intricacies of working in a global organisation with a complex footprint.

5. Automating governance

Once data has been properly classified, organised, de-risked, and stored, the real efficiency can occur as these different strategies can be operationalised through automation. Handling data and critical information in an ad-hoc or manual manner is simply not scalable, especially as data proliferates.

Setting up automation that effectively handles incoming information according to your organisations’ requirements helps ensure that maximum productivity is achieved, more importantly, ongoing risk is minimised.

Combining the Iron Mountain tools and services to automate your organisation’s information is essential. Automation helps ensure that policies and procedures are adhered to and your organisation is properly operationalising its information governance plan. Such automation gives an organisation confidence that it is minimising risk over time, removing information that is no longer actionable through a defensible plan that protects the organisation as well as its customers or users.

Iron Mountain Information Governance services

As a leader in document processing and handling, Iron Mountain has a strong set of offerings, both products and services, to help drive better information governance. As organisations look towards implementing a complete information governance review and clean-up, our IG Retain and IG Cleanse services are key offerings that can help guide your organisation through this process.

IG Retain

This consulting service and its related technologies help manage content consistent with regulatory, legal and privacy obligations. In addition to removing the ROT from an organisation, the records and operational data, identified as critical through organisational retention policies or regional regulatory standards, can be maintained. Through the implementation of a document taxonomy and retention schedule, Iron Mountain can help organisations better manage the retention of their truly critical information. In conjunction with our cloud-based Retention Centre and our Global Research Service, organisations can operate confidently, knowing that their information is safe and relevant to their mission. Iron Mountain’s Policy Center solution connects with various enterprise content management systems, including its InSight^® Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and other platforms such as Microsoft 365 (M365), to embed information governance where data resides.

IG Cleanse

This service provides a technology solution that de-risks digital content and provides technical support to increase the usability of information. Most organisations maintain records and operational data, but another large category is information that is redundant, outdated, and trivial (ROT). This ROT information often makes up as much as 70% of the retained data, and from a risk perspective, it can often hold some of the greatest exposure. With Iron Mountain IG Cleanse, we help entities analyse the ROT data, determining which data should be retained and which can be safely deleted. This reduces storage demands and risks whilst boosting usability.

Call to action

With the technological, regulatory, and management challenges that organisations face today, now is the perfect opportunity to engage with Iron Mountain to address a data clean-up that will help minimise risk, reduce waste, increase efficiency and better prepare your organisation for its data-driven future.