To effectively perform critical data management tasks—such as data migration, storage consolidation and the periodic deletion of files that that your business no longer needs to retain—you need an accurate, complete, granular, and up-to-date inventory of all of your company’s unstructured data assets. Without such an inventory, it is impossible to ensure that your data management policies are being comprehensively applied to all appropriate data assets—because you won’t know what and where those assets are.
Constructing this inventory, however, can be extremely difficult as multiple copies and versions of Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, emails and other unstructured data proliferate across the enterprise. To make matters worse, these assets are constantly changing. Users keep creating new content and exchanging documents with each other and external business partners. Content is also added thought M&A activity, subscription services, and even unauthorized downloads. Without rigorous management of this data, storage costs can go through the roof and users can find it more and more difficult to find the information they really need.
Do You Really Know What Information You Have?
To get a better handle on all the unstructured data dispersed across your enterprise environment, you need to be able to answer several critical questions, including:
- What content resides on my storage infrastructure?
- Can I identify and locate every single piece of unstructured data to which I need to apply any given data management policy?
- Can I identify and locate all copies and versions of any given business document?
- Can I sort-and-report all of my information assets based on business content, last use or any other attribute?
- Do I have any way of discovering irregular changes in my data inventory?
Learn more about NogaLogic's Data Inventory Assessment >>>