Are You Adopting the Right Tools and Tactics for IG?

You might be wondering how an organization decides what to do with their data. What tools are they using? And what tactics are they implementing?

The massive amount of information organizations are storing is outstanding, and as we already know, not everything stored is valuable at all.

This is exactly what organizations are dealing with – what to keep and what to delete. That’s why, as we discussed in the previous blog, organizations are choosing to implement IG programs. With an Information Governance program, they can clean up their data by finding their most valuable information that is currently “dark,” and getting rid of the ROT data. According to the Global Databerg Report, you’d be surprised to find out that 52% of an organization’s data is dark.

To better understand how organizations are tackling this challenge, we launched a new research initiative targeted at uncovering which tools and tactics organizations use to help alleviate the challenges brought on by the unstructured data explosion. We identified 18 different tools and 14 different tactics that organizations implement under the Information Governance umbrella. Through this research, we wanted to understand across those approaches, what was the degree of adoption, and the degree of effectiveness for each of the tools and tactics. 

What came back was very interesting.

Across all the 32 different tools and tactics, each had over 60% adoption rate—meaning that at least six out of ten organizations had deployed all of these different approaches. This high percentage of adoption shows that organizations are willing to try a wide variety of tools and tactics in order to get the results they want.

These are the three most highly adopted tools:

Interestingly, archiving solutions were by far the most adopted when it came to tools. These results demonstrate that one of the core beliefs organizations hold, is that information is inherently valuable and they should “store everything.” Organizations typically refuse to delete anything. Since organizations are storing everything, it’s required for them to have tools that help with storage optimization like these archiving solutions. Therefore, it’s not surprising that archiving tools got the most adoption since they enable organizations to better manage their expansive storage footprint.

Now that we looked at the tools, we can take a look at which tactics are the most adopted:

What’s intriguing about these approaches is the sheer amount of manual effort required to adopt these tactics.  For example, requiring employees to tag their data, or training employees to self-police are approaches that take time and effort. With these, there is also a lot of accountability being put on the end-users. Unfortunately, those efforts don’t always prove to be the most beneficial to the organization.

The conclusion is that organizations have made significant investments in tools that facilitate storage optimization and tactics that require time and training. While these are important, organizations need to also understand that there are a wide variety of tools and tactics that high performers are using that could bring even more value to their information.

Stay tuned to learn what those are in the next blog.

What do you find the most surprising about the most highly adopted tools and tactics?

You can also listen to the Information Governance best practices webcast to learn more.