Managing Unstructured Information for Control, Compliance and Cost

Comparison of existing and actual data categories may highlight gaps between what your organization believes it should have and what it actually has. The legacy data clean-up process may confirm that legacy data does not fit into current business categories and that work must to be done to fill this gap.

Once information categories are identified, validated and aligned, policy may be applied to data within these categories to facilitate their future disposition or ongoing management.

Reduce. Once legacy data is categorized and the appropriate policy is applied, the process of reducing data can begin with confidence. The reduction of data will yield returns in a range of areas, from reducing information storage to improving business efficiency and reducing risk.

A legacy data clean-up solution delivers a range of tools and reports that support a policy-driven and compliant clean-up process with the following capabilities:

• Generate reports on items marked for deletion;
• Maintain audit trails of policy selection criteria and execution; and
• Review and approve workflow processes.

Manage or migrate. Legacy data clean-up is not just about deleting redundant, obsolete and trivial data. It also identifies how business processes use and generate information. The forward-looking aspect of legacy data clean-up is the migration of valuable legacy data into your current information governance plan to ensure the data can be leveraged and securely managed for the future.

Legacy data clean-up solutions support a range of functions that merge legacy data into current systems, enabling you to manage them using your current information governance policies:

• Declare documents into a records management system;
• Securely move data, or hold it for management in place;
• Migrate organized legacy data onto target storage hierarchy;
• Migrate organized legacy data between repositories as needed (e.g. file system to SharePoint); and
• Create an ongoing process for applying policy to new data identified based on established and trained categories.

Benefits of Legacy Data Clean-up

The value of an information governance project is often reviewed by IT and the business in very different ways. Legacy data clean-up is an information governance process that both aligns and delivers benefits to each of these internal organizations.

Reduce information footprint and associated storage and discovery costs. Legacy data clean-up addresses the expanding information footprint by identifying redundant, obsolete and trivial data and providing the tools needed to apply policy and execute defensible disposition. The disposal of this data not only reduces your storage needs, but also reduces the associated costs and resources required to maintain backup and recovery systems.

Streamline data management and prepare for the cloud. Organizations looking to move applications and data to the cloud should consider the benefits of legacy data clean-up prior to migrating to the new platform. While cloud services offer cost savings to organizations in a number of areas, these gains could be lost or minimized if the organization moves all of its legacy data to the cloud. Additionally, the cost for cloud data management can quickly rise when based on the number of terabytes of data stored, managed and accessed each month.

Increase IT efficiency and service levels. The ability to dispose of or migrate data to appropriate storage tiers can deliver both cost and efficiency benefits to your organization. Removing legacy data will yield significant savings and efficiencies associated with every day IT activities. Reducing the complexity and time needed for data backup and recovery, application maintenance, and search and retrieval will increase IT efficiency and improve service levels.

Comply with regulatory requirements by applying policy to all data. Identifying, understanding and actively managing all of your data enables you to apply appropriate policy to this information to ensure you manage it according to regulatory requirements, and avoid security breaches, data leaks and accidental data spoliation. The application of policy to all data according to a solid information governance plan will help you reduce the likelihood of legacy data footprints expanding beyond control and exposing your organization to future business risk.