When Big Data Goes Dark

Complicating efforts to rein in dark data is the simple fact that data continues to grow at volumetric rates. It wasn't all that long ago that a terabyte was considered unwieldy. Now it's estimated that organizations will collect and store tens of millions of petabytes of data over the next few years. Given that the vast majority of data housed by businesses is unstructured, meaning it is not able to be stored and organized in a traditional relational application, the places where data can go dark will only expand. For example, unchecked growth of dark data often includes:

Employee data. When an employee leaves an organization, IT will typically take a snapshot of their laptop before wiping it clean and will dump the data on a server somewhere to deal with later. These mini-caches of personal data would be an attractive target for an opportunistic threat actor.

Post-M&A. Following a merger or acquisition, the acquiring company will work to quickly integrate the acquired company's data into its environment. Typically, in such a scenario, the data of the acquired business will also be copied, moved off-site, and (all too often) forgotten. Since this mirrored source of data often contains personally identifiable information, or PII, this represents another potential dark data risk.

Big data mashups. Not only are data volumes growing at exponential rates, they're also propagating in ways that can be hard to predict. As advanced analytics takes hold of the enterprise, we see more departments mixing and mashing datasets together to fuel business insights. But with every mashup, there is the potential for more data to go dark.

While most enterprises have some type of information governance in place that articulates their data policy guidelines, enforcing these policies is a challenge. Employees are already overwhelmed with their day-to-day tasks, so asking individual users with minimal training to properly tag and classify their data is unrealistic at best—and, at worst, will likely introduce inconsistency, manual errors, or simply be ignored.

Instant Insights /

The Danger Lurking in Dark Data and the Importance of Strong Information Governance

Related Stories

Recommended For You