Reading time: About 5 minutes
Automated Intelligence recently sponsored and attended the IRMS 2022 conference in Glasgow where the theme focused on resilience, recovery and renewal. This got us thinking, how important is the renewal of data as part of the digital transformation journey? We discuss this in our latest blog as well as the 5 pain points to avoid during migration.
IRMS stated, “Resilience, Recovery and Renewal recognises the phases of individuals and organisations in response to the effects of the global pandemic, and the critical role of information and records management in enabling and supporting business continuity.” Indeed, during and since the pandemic, organisations have had to swiftly rethink how they engage with their information, including learning how to manage significant amounts of siloed data, enhance the security around that data and enable collaboration and improved ways of working.
The pandemic not only catapulted remote working into an almost overnight necessity, but it also brought with it many challenges, particularly for those organisations dealing with on-premise data. These challenges included how to get the information into a place and form that was accessible outside the firewall whilst managing the risk of breach. Many organisations made a leap to online collaboration platforms like Microsoft Office 365, but didn’t follow a prescribed approach and moved everything, regardless of what it was or whether they should be keeping it. They did this significantly fast, condensing their previous migration plans and likely at a cost. Despite the improved collaboration that platforms such Microsoft Office 365 brought us, it’s paramount we need to work towards a digital future that doesn’t constrain where or how we work and maintain the same level of continuity and business as usual. But we need to balance this with ensuring that the information we hold is necessary and compliant with regulations.
At Automated Intelligence, we’ve always been a cloud first company, helping organisations understand what data they have, identifying the information governance and security challenges involved with their data and providing help as they transition and migrate to cloud platforms. As organisations look forward, they need to take control of their data and future proof their assets, enhancing the ability and flexibility to adapt to events as they unfold. In our experience, we’ve witnessed first-hand the dos and don’ts, the good and the bad when it comes to a successful cloud migration journey. Below we outline our top 5 pain points you could avoid.
5 pain points you could avoid during your cloud migration journey
1. Getting to grips with your data
The volume, velocity and variety of data is increasingly growing every day. It’s important for businesses to have visibility and oversight of that data, understand where it is kept, whether that’s on file shares, user personal drives or legacy management solutions and understand what the data is. Data can take place in many forms such as emails, videos, images and spreadsheets. Not only is it vital to have clarity over what data is held but who the data owner is, who has access to it and what value it holds for the organisation.
2. Getting users to do the cleanse
In our experience, one approach we’ve come across is the transition drive approach where organisations create an area where users ‘prep’ the data for migration, making them responsible for determining what data to keep and what data to destroy. The problem with this is that users don’t engage and make as few decisions as possible. They either get bogged down in trying to make decisions at a file level or they make high level decisions that introduce multiple risks such as deleting data that shouldn’t be deleted, having no control over what was lost and missing sensitive data.
3. Metadata Mayhem
We often see organisations with lots of chaos data, taking up unnecessary storage and containing sensitive information. These include:
- Redundant files – these could be associated with software packages that are no longer in use by the organisation.
- File retention – records should be retained according to a retention schedule and the relevant legislation. Similarly, records should not be disposed of prior to its retention date.
- Personal files – whilst your acceptable user policy may advise otherwise, some users will take advantage of their organisation’s infrastructure to store personal files, these can generate a large footprint in volume terms.
4. Poor sensitive data management
Organisations may not be aware of the sensitive data that they hold such as PII or PCI information.
Over time permissions on unstructured data sources can become poorly managed and become a hotbed of risk, moving to the cloud requires a re-evaluation of your existing security model. It’s important to review this access in line with GDPR regulations in order to remain compliant and reduce data breaches and associated fines.
5. Letting users continue to use legacy systems
Continuing to let users use legacy systems after migration results in multiple versions of the truth and inevitably leads to further remediation work in the future wasting resources and time. Legacy platforms should be decommissioned during the migration process to ensure efficient and accurate information management.
How Automated Intelligence can help:
AI.DATALIFT from Automated Intelligence is a unique, cloud-based analytics and migration solution that enables organisations to catalogue valuable information assets, provide full discovery, categorisation, retention and defensible disposition to effectively remediate risk and help protect data across file shares and legacy on-premise EDRMS platforms.
AI.DATALIFT will enable you to discover, report and take action to remedy: • Password protected files • ROT and duplicated files • Broken security inheritance • Over-exposed security access • Linked spreadsheets • Over-retained records • Inappropriately stored PII • Orphaned information
If you’d like further information on our AI.DATALIFT solution, download our brochure here or visit our website.
