Finding the ‘big data’ balance

While the term ‘big data’ may be overused and over-hyped, the phrase has at its core a promise: with enough data, processing power and intelligence, organisations can gain insight, predict the future, make better decisions and get an edge up on competitors.

However, when it comes to unstructured data, that’s the human generated information found in emails, documents, photos and other formats – it’s typically not about predicting the future, but reacting to a complex event such as regulatory compliance or a cybersecurity breach. Often, the biggest struggle is not getting enough data but having too much.

Business problems including privacy, cybersecurity, records management and storage optimisation all require organisations to ask difficult questions of their unstructured data and receive comprehensive and timely answers. These include questions like: Where is our IP? Does the data we’re storing pose a business risk? Where do we keep high-risk or high-value data and how can we find out if it escapes?

Providing timely answers to these questions can be a challenge. Unstructured data formats are much harder to search and analyse than databases or simple text, making ‘big data’ more of a challenge than an advantage. Because organisations create and store massive volumes of unstructured data organisations, large proportions of it will be irrelevant.

To solve these disparate problems, most organisations invest in point solutions such as information security and records management applications. IT departments must provide technical and logistical support for many of these tools at considerable cost. Even though the questions being asked of the data are quite similar, the answers are required by different parts of the business. Under these circumstances, it’s difficult to expect a coordinated response.

However, the end result is organisations using several different and very expensive hammers to drive the same nail. Although the people in different parts of the business may not realise it, they all face common challenges. These include hard-to-understand data formats, too much data, important data stored inappropriately and multiple tools and point solutions.

Taking a data-centric approach
A common thread connects privacy, cybersecurity, records management and storage optimisation: all require organisations to ask difficult questions of their unstructured data and receive comprehensive and timely answers. By taking a data-centric approach, and using the right technology, organisations can crack open the content of their unstructured data and develop processes and competencies that will reduce costs, improve efficiency and deliver new sources of business value.

Text and visual analytics
Use tools with built-in text analytics such as auto-classification, clustering, topic modelling, text summarisation, deduplication and near-duplicate management to search, understand, classify and minimise data sets. Interactive graphical tools including timelines, communication network diagrams, commonality network diagrams and trend, pivot and intersection charts make it easy to slice, dice and visualise data so you can quickly identify trends, locate information of interest and drill down to specifics.

Living index

Frequently investigated organisations use powerful collection and discovery technologies to maintain a regularly updated index of all files and emails. The automated collection technologies conduct scheduled updates, adding only the most recent data to the index. This index is instantly searchable, eliminating the lag between when someone asks a question and when the organisation can start finding the answers.
Information governance
The proliferation of data is a major driver of costs in many information-gathering activities. Some organisations are seeking to minimise their storage volumes by eliminating data that is duplicated, trivial, obsolete, past its retention period or even potentially harmful.

Rather than waiting for a trigger event such as a data breach or an email migration, some organisations are initiating information governance processes to do this as a matter of course. Such information governance projects very quickly become self-funding through reduced storage spending and improved risk management. They can also become a source of business value as employees become more effective and organisations leverage the knowledge they have gained from understanding their own data.

Answering the tough questions
UK organisations across many different industries use Nuix technology to provide these answers, because of its unique ability to make unstructured data accessible for searching, analysis and management. You can apply a data-centric approach across diverse business areas including privacy, cybersecurity, and intellectual property protection, records management, storage optimisation, mergers and acquisitions and regulatory and audit information requests.