File Analysis - Real World Stories

Monday, September 28, 2020 10:00 AM

CASE STUDY: File Analysis - Real World Stories

 

It's no secret that we are living in an age of exponential data growth.

It has been estimated that 80-90% of all business data is unstructured, and 80% of this is never even retrieved again once it has served its purpose.

With the recent rapid introduction of remote collaboration tools, information is becoming even less structured, harder to find across ecosystems (multiple repositories and applications), and more difficult to manage.  Further, with the availability of features such as the Teams recording option to transcribe your meetings, meeting information is being indexed and becoming much more historically valuable (but rarely managed).

While eDRMS tools such as Content Manager allow you to structure your information and manage it appropriately, we have seen a number of organisations still struggle to contain all of their corporate information to a single managed system, which can then introduce security, searchability and governance risks.

Users will be users, and if they can save information somewhere more convenient, they will!

There is, however, a solution that does not require businesses to radically change the way they do everything though.

File analysis tools allow organisations to connect to multiple sets of different types data, understand exactly what they are holding, and action it. This includes file shares, emails, archive systems, SharePoint, eDRMS and many more.

ControlPoint and Data Discovery, two leading file analysis products from Micro Focus, have been used by WyldLynx both internally and extensively with a number of clients over the past 5 years.

With very similar file analysis functionality, the main difference between the two products is that ControlPoint is run as a locally installed product, where Data Discovery is cloud based.  Click the links to learn more about these two powerful and helpful tools.

The introduction of these tools has allowed for a vast number of wins relating to legacy data clean up and locating key data, including:

• Identifying duplicates, trivial files, and information no longer required, as well as allowing the clean-up of this information to create more space
• Scoured repositories for key project/sensitive information and relocate it to the managed information system
• Responded to Information Requests with certainty that all information stores have been assessed
• Responded to potential security breaches with confidence that you know what is being held
• Actioned Commission of Inquiry or Royal Commission disposal freezes by locating and placing a hold on in-scope information
• Understood the history and story of data growth and analyse based on a range of filters

Throughout these processes, we have seen both tangible and non-tangible benefits for all of our analytics customers.  Here are a few highlights from some of our experiences with ControlPoint and Data Discovery on actual, real world business data:

Save Money in Storage Alone
This customer had 20 terabytes of unstructured data of which 50%(!) was duplicated across their environment. By de-duplicating the data they estimated a saving of $2.5 Million dollars over 5 years in storage alone.

Respond to a Disposal Freeze
The Federal and QLD government issued a disposal freeze on records relating to vulnerable people. File analytics was used to locate information in scope, and then apply a hold to these records so that they could not be deleted or edited until the disposal freeze was lifted.

Respond to Requests for Information
One customer had a multitude of ways to obtain information from a range of systems when an information request was submitted.  However, they were not always confident that they could produce everything within the scope of the request. By scanning their multiple systems through one interface, they were able to successfully and confidently locate the information using content and metadata key words.

Locate sensitive data such as credit card information
WyldLynx always reiterates to our customers that no matter what policies they have in place for storing sensitive information (such as credit card details), users will be users and may not actually consider the policy while in the process of doing their work.  After undertaking a pattern matching exercise across their data stores, we found that 1% of a customer's unstructured (and unsecured) data contained a pattern matching a credit card pattern. This allowed the customer to relocate and secure this information into Content Manager with the correct security applied.

Sensitive Government Information
Sensitive documents relating to Board and Executive meetings were held in an unstructured file system, allowing anyone with access the ability to delete them, as well as view or alter information contributing to senate briefs. The customer was able to locate these and secure them into the relevant repository, reducing risk of breach of confidentiality and providing confidence to due process.

Cloud migration
A customer needed to make sure they did not transfer their 'junk' from their on-premise storage over to SharePoint during their cloud transition. They were able to relocate their transient information (non-records) from the file system into an archive drive, and relocate only what was relevant to the cloud (using time and content-based rules and policies). The transient information was then due to be destroyed automatically after two years of not being accessed.

As you can see there is a large range of use cases for file analytics, and the list is continuing to grow.

Customers are seeking more automated information management options, and ControlPoint and Data Discovery from Micro Focus allow organisations to both define their needs and actually apply policies that meet those needs, all from a single interface.

For a free consultation and a better understanding of the power of file analytics and how it can benefit your organisation, visit our special ControlPoint promotion page, get in touch at contact@wyldlynx.com.au, or call us today on 1300 WYLDLYNX (1300 9953 5969).