Tuesday, 14 October 2008

Poor Data Classification Can Cost Companies Millions

Access control is apparently the top reason why companies decide to classify data if studies from UK's data storage and information management event, Storage Expo, is anything to go by...

Access control is apparently the top reason why companies decide to classify data if studies from UK's data storage and information management event, Storage Expo, is anything to go by.

According to the results released, some 67% of companies classify data because of access control whilst 21% did it because of retention control and 12% decided retrieval and discovery was good enough a reason to classify data.

Although access control may be the key reason to classify data, Alan Pelz- Sharpe, Principal, CMS Watch believes companies should place more importance on the impact of retrieval and discovery with costs in this area reaching 1,000,000 pounds per Terabyte.

“Typically 80% of mail data consists of duplication. Yet any search tool has to treat each piece of data equally, thus slowing down the process and pushing discovery costs through the roof,” said Pelz- Sharpe.

“We estimate that the cost of 1GB of storage is about 10p, however the cost of legal discovery on 1GB of storage would cost at least 1000 pounds, so storing everything may seem cheap on the one hand, but can become very expensive should something go wrong.”

Theresa Regali, Principal, CMS Watch, says, “Increasingly, data classification is determined based on intended use of data, rather than simply its subject matter or source. Classification is vital to ensure data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands and security protocols are met and to facilitate enterprise-wide search, retrieval and discovery”.