Most South African organisations have no clear idea what sensitive data they're sitting on, where it lives, or who can get to it – and the regulator is running out of patience.
Faranani DocTec, an OpenText Platinum Partner, hosted a webinar in partnership with ITWeb recently to help South African organisations get to grips with data discovery, risk insight and information governance, as regulators step up enforcement of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
The session featured two Faranani DocTec specialists – Ben van Niekerk, Business Development Executive: Cybersecurity, and Jonathan Steyn, Senior EIM Consultant and Cyber Security Analyst – who unpacked why so many organisations still lack visibility into the personal and sensitive information they hold, where it lives and who can access it.
Van Niekerk opened by pointing to the scale of the problem locally. South African organisations are recording a steady stream of data breaches, and the Information Regulator is actively investigating and fining organisations under POPIA. “If we don't govern data properly, there are huge implications,” he said, describing data governance as the framework of policies, processes, roles and technologies that keeps data accurate, secure and well managed throughout its life cycle. Without it, organisations face compliance, financial and strategic risks, including blind spots that lead to poor decision-making.
About 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, and roughly 70% of that can be classed as dark data – information nobody is using, including ‘ROT’ (redundant, obsolete or trivial) data. Some 23% of unstructured data contains personally identifiable information (PII), exposure that carries real financial consequences: the Department of Justice was recently fined R5 million over a 2021 security compromise. Live polling backed this up: only 29% of attendees said they were fully confident they knew where all their ROT data and PII were stored, while 22% were not confident at all – largely because they are reluctant to delete data for fear of losing something important.
To address this, Van Niekerk introduced OpenText's Core Data and Risk Insights, a solution that automatically scans, classifies and manages structured and unstructured data across an organisation to identify sensitive information, reduce breach costs, support privacy compliance and eliminate redundant data. It is available in packages ranging from scans of specific repositories to full enterprise-wide deployments.
Steyn then demonstrated the solution's data discovery and classification, risk visualisation and data management features. “At the heart of many data breaches lies unknown data,” he said. “ROT data also increases storage costs and attack surfaces. The goal isn't just data clean-up – it's also about compliance.” The resulting dashboards, he added, create searchable records that support audits and investigations while reducing storage costs.
The webinar underlined a consistent message: organisations that cannot see their data cannot govern it. This mirrors a pattern Faranani DocTec sees across its own client engagements – organisations that handle a breach well are rarely the ones with the most sophisticated tools, but the ones that already knew what data they held before an incident forced the question.
For organisations ready to move from awareness to action, Faranani DocTec offers a Data Security Posture Assessment (DSPA) – a structured engagement giving real-time visibility into where sensitive data lives, strengthening alignment with POPIA, GDPR and ISO, and identifying vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
To find out more or book a DSPA, contact Ben van Niekerk at ben.vanniekerk@faranani.com.
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