Unstructured data is primarily the source of intellectual property (IP) within organisations today, yet the explosion of this information has negatively impacted governance.
This is the view of Grant Hodgkinson, Mimecast business development director, who spoke at yesterday's ITWeb Governance, Risk and Compliance event, at The Forum, in Bryanston.
“The problem of unstructured data is relatively new. In the past, the knowledge creators were the minority. The pie has shifted fundamentally today, and the majority of workers are involved in knowledge work.
“How quickly we can innovate and come up with new ideas collaboratively determines competitiveness today, and whether a business will last beyond its competitors,” explained Hodgkinson.
“In 2006, when Word processors and unstructured information utilities were still in their infancy, unstructured data was still in the minority. However, with a 67% compound annual growth rate of data per year, this resulted in a shift. In 2013, it's expected 67% of information will be unstructured and 30% will be structured.”
He pointed out that competitive advantage for business lies with unstructured data; however, it's also highly prone to theft. “Unstructured data is complex and expensive to manage. The board is bound to protect the assets in a company, including unstructured data. Legislation makes it necessary for unstructured data to be managed.”
“Organisations need to adopt effective user management, rights and roles management, and technology protection. Cultural security is important to generate awareness of potential theft, provide continuous training and educate the mobile workforce.
“Collaboration of IP using unstructured data is not being done inside the office, it's being done outside of the perimeters of the organisation. It needs to be secured in an appropriate way.”
He said e-mail, which experiences 30% annual year-on-year volume growth, contains huge amounts of unstructured data and intellectual property, but in order to manage it effectively, he said the most relevant application is cloud computing. “We've seen customers' [ability to] abdicate the archive and search requirement to a hosted service provider has resonated. It makes sense to do e-mail in the cloud considering scalability requirements.”
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