Electronic Content Classification Service

Business challenge

You may have a lot of dark, redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) data sitting in file shares, SharePoint sites, email, databases, tapes and other repositories. Much of this information is not managed properly and represents risk to the business (such as unencrypted PII and new US and European requirements for timely disposition of personal information). Dark data prevents informed business decisions. It also burdens big data and AI programs because 60-80% of the effort is data preparation including ROT cleanup. ROT also affects IT operations such as migration to the cloud and backup. In short, you need to know what you have, where it is and manage it accordingly.

You may have production systems with databases that have grown so big they have become slow, impacting end user productivity and affecting system backups which are taking too long. Overstuffed databases can trigger system outages and be the cause of lengthy system restores that are disruptive to business operations and customer service.

You may be running more applications than you want to because of past acquisitions or moving to new platforms and leaving the old data behind. These systems are expensive to maintain and should ideally be turned off. Before you do so, you need to determine what to do with the legacy data in the database, so it can be accessed and managed in context of its "record of business."

What if you could

• Illuminate and inventory dark data, making duplicate, trivial obsolete and sensitive content readily visible so it can be disposed of quickly?
• Classify and defensibly destroy nearly 70% of data you no longer need?
• Identify less active data, migrate it to an archive and manage it in accordance with its prescribed compliance and operational retention requirements at far lower cost?
• Decommission applications that are no longer in use by extracting data in a way that maintains the native context once outside the application and thereby eliminate maintenance and data center costs?

How this affects you

Increased cost of finding essential information, as structured and unstructured data continues to reside in multiple locations, with a high percentage of duplicates and obsolete content.

Increased sensitive data stored over many years has resulted in a compilation of unknown data which may contain personally identifiable information, passwords, trade secrets or other valuable business content.

Increased litigation risk due to distributed, non-required information is problematic because it increases the cost and risk of litigation.

Over-retention of Information impacts your IT budget, despite falling costs of storage, and may have dire compliance consequences. Because so much of this data is dark, it carries inherent risk, elevated cost of storage and lost opportunity of information assets that could be put to use to accelerate revenue.

Decreased backup efficiency because your business has grown and so has activity within production systems. A lack of active systems archiving content within them is causing them to slow down, extend backup times and increase costs.

More difficult application portfolio management because your business has amassed many applications over time and undergone changes to new platforms, including taking applications to the cloud. However, decommissioning legacy applications is still lacking. These orphaned applications suck up hardware and software maintenance costs, data center energy and HVAC resources.

Electronic Content Classification & Data Remediation

At Iron Mountain, our Electronic Content Classification and Data Remediation service leverages a range of platforms for classifying and remediating both structured and unstructured data stored on-premise, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. Our skills and tools are used in a range of use cases including:

• Redundant Obsolete & Trivial Data Remediation

  According to industry research and Iron Mountain’s experience, the level of ROT at most firms is up to 70%. Eliminating data that is duplicative, past its disposition date or not required to be retained at all, reduces compliance and legal risk, as well as reducing costs. Once the ROT is eliminated and the rest is classified into your record classes, it turns what is left into a managed, curated collection that is more valuable for data analytics and asset valuation purposes.

• Privacy Remediation

  Iron Mountain is able to identify all manner of sensitive information, delete what is not needed, or migrate or mask it based on customer requirements. We have definitions available for PII, PHI, PCI across more than 50 jurisdictions as well as the ability to identify sensitive information including business confidential matters.

• Migration to the Cloud

  Many Iron Mountain customers are in the process of migrating to Office 365 and SharePoint online as well as migrating legacy structured applications to cloud-based alternatives. Our solutions enable content to be both cleaned up and migrated to new cloud-based repositories.

• Managing Structured Records

  Many of the most important business records in an organization are born and managed in structured data applications. Moreover, many unstructured records are really extracts, reports and images of structured data. Iron Mountain can help you manage your structured data as records reducing both the cost to manage these records and improving your ability to dispose of them in accordance with your retention schedule.

Iron Mountain organizes content according to your record retention schedule, which enables defensible disposition.

Our experienced staff of consultants, data scientists and lawyers can work with your organization to help configure, develop, and apply methodology over legacy and day-forward content. You’ll get help normalizing and updating metadata, making it more consistent and improving accessibility for both structured and unstructured data.

What you gain

• Ability to know what you have and find what you need more easily.
• Informed decisions about what to keep and where to keep it (on premise or in the cloud).
• Position to prevent data loss, including privacy breaches and theft of high-value information.
• Better use of time and improved service responsiveness.
• Applications are operating with desirable speed; users are more productive; customer satisfaction is improved.
• Smaller footprint and reduced IT costs associated with software licenses, hardware, energy consumption, technical administration and backups.
• A rationalized, cleaned up body of content for big data, AI programs.