How Well Do You Know Your Data?

Did you know that of all the unstructured data within your business, as much as 70% on average is Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial? 

Unstructured data is any file or document that is not stored within a structured database. Examples of this include emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and other data.

Organisations routinely store duplicate copies of the same file across various platforms, taking up large volumes of storage, but more importantly, representing a huge compliance risk if the unstructured data contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as personnel or medical records.

Determining the amount and location of sensitive information across multiple unstructured data repositories is a significant undertaking, even for smaller organisations and typically serves as a barrier to accomplishing this task. However, since the introduction of GDPR it has become an essential task organisations are required to complete.

Under the terms of GDPR, organisations are no longer able to hold onto PII if they don’t have a legitimate interest to hold it.

A recent example of an organisation falling foul of these regulations was Marriot International who were fined £99.2m after reporting the loss of 339m guest records to the ICO even though the database was no longer used for business operations as confirmed in their press release refuting the fine.

However, under GDPR regulations, Marriot no longer had a reason to hold onto the database and should have cleaned up their data which would have seen them avoid the fine which amounted to 3% of their global annual turnover.

Using a File Analytic platform with in-depth reporting capabilities, such as ControlPoint would have enabled Marriot to automatically analyse their data to provide invaluable insight into the level of data file duplication, data types, individual file size and ageing characteristics, while also classifying data items that contain PII/sensitive information.

SES have recently announced an exclusive partnership with StoreX ltd, a supplier of the ControlPoint product. This partnership has enabled us to take a high profile solution, originally intended for the large businesses and shape our offering into an affordable subscription model for SME’s to gain a greater understanding of their data portfolio, to help with their digital transformation and GDPR compliancy journeys.

To celebrate our launch of this new service, we are running a proof of concept offer from now until September 30th for the first 15 customers to implement the ControlPoint product within their business.

SES are inviting those within your business who are responsible for Data Management, Security or Compliance, onto an online demonstration of the product. To book a demonstration of ControlPoint and discover how it can benefit your business, please get in touch to speak to one of our specialists. 

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