As your business grows, the data you store grows with it. The journey is about getting the right people to assess the kinds of information stored, what it is used for & why it is important.
How do I accurately plan for the journey?
The challenge for businesses is to understand the kinds of information it has stored and the compliance, legal and regulatory requirements around it.
Insentra can help you begin this journey by performing an assessment on a subset of your environment, we can be as agile or flexible as you need. We can help you learn about your information, Analyse your information governance needs and manage it from beginning to end.
Information governance is about ensuring that your data has the right level of control: Who it belongs to, where it resides, internal and external visibility, legal and privacy compliance, all the way through its lifecycle.
Once you understand what information you have and why it is important, only then can you take action.
What is holding me back?
A lot of organisations do not have control over their data or know how to identify important information from content that ought to have been deleted years ago.
If somebody leaves your business, for example, how will you know what you’re legally allowed to keep or whether you’re breaching any privacy laws if you don’t even know where the information pertaining to that person is stored? Your storage footprint & backup environment will grow in accordance with your business if you don’t have an Information governance strategy and so too will your associated costs.
How can I determine costs along the way?
We had a conversation with a customer that did not want to implement an information governance strategy through fear that the cost savings achieved would result in their next FY budget being decreased.
Taking this approach to information governance will only lead to significant cost increases over time. Information Governance is an investment and the associated costs will vary depending on the kind of business, however, the shift of your budget allocation to a long term strategy can save you from losing that money altogether.
Businesses could be saving a significant amount of money per year simply by implementing an information lifecycle strategy. How the business decides to use the existing savings is up to them, but to not do anything at all because you want a bigger budget next year is exceptionally short-sighted.
