IG Cleanse solution

What if you could:

• Significantly reduce the costs of managing unstructured information
• Classify and defensibly destroy data you no longer need
• Identify and secure sensitive information
• Reduce timeframes and costs of migration programs
• Demonstrate defensible compliance with regulatory requirements

Challenge

Most companies struggle to understand what data really exists in their organization. Electronic data is typically growing by over 50% year-over-year and organizations cannot manage this data effectively if they do not know what exists in this dark data.

In short, you need to know what you have, where it is, what level of risk exists and manage it accordingly.

How this affects you

• Increased costs and AI challenges. With electronic data typically growing by 50%+ year- over-year, the costs of storing and managing this information are increasing annually and making it harder for organizations to find the right information quickly and meet sustainability goals.
• Compliance with regulatory requirements. In the age of increasing regulatory controls, demonstrating compliance and reducing the levels of risk are complicated if an organization cannot identify where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or other sensitive data resides.
• Cyber breach incidents. With data breaches increasing by over 70% year-over-year, the costs of preparing for and managing these incidents are also increasing significantly. An organization with a ‘keep everything forever’ policy, if impacted by a data breach, can experience significant regulatory fines and reputational damage based on the ‘smoking guns’ contained within the breached content.
• Platform changes: cloud migration and application retirement. Typically, preparing data for migrations is a time- consuming and costly exercise, especially when organizations have vast amounts of dark data. Relying on individuals to prepare and organize data frequently leads to inconsistencies. Many organizations also maintain legacy applications simply to preserve access to the data required for retention.

IG Cleanse & data remediation

At Iron Mountain, our IG Cleanse assessment and data remediation service uses best-in-class technologies for classifying and remediating unstructured and structured data stored on-premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments. Our skills and tools are used in a range of use cases including:

Redundant Obsolete & Trivial data remediation: Iron Mountain can help reduce your data footprint often by 50% or more through the identification of content that is duplicate or has no further business value namely described as Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (ROT).

Eliminating duplicative data, expired records, or information that is not required for retention helps reduce compliance and legal risks while also lowering costs. For organizations seeking a holistic approach, IG Cleanse’s remediation capabilities can be combined with the information governance features of Iron Mountain’s InSight^® Digital Experience Platform (DXP), such as retention policy management, to provide both immediate cleanup and long-term control over unstructured data.

AI data preparation: Improving the signal-to-noise ratio by eliminating ROT data enables more efficient and less expensive learning language model creation and use. Our IG Cleanse managed services and software offer both one-time and ongoing support for forward-thinking and acting organizations.

Privacy remediation: Iron Mountain’s solutions can rapidly analyze an organization’s data and identify and secure PII, official records, and other sensitive data. The time taken to create and apply data labels is typically reduced by more than 20x over a manual effort.

We have ready-made models available for PII, Protected Health Information (PHI) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI) policies across more than 50 jurisdictions as well as the ability to codify and identify any type of sensitive information specific to your business needs.

Cloud migration, back-up, and application retirement: Many Iron Mountain customers are in the process of migrating to Microsoft 365 and Iron Mountain InSight DXP, and/or building out cyber recovery programs. IG Cleanse enables content to be cleaned up and migrated to new data repositories; this also allows for the retirement of legacy applications maintained solely for preserving data.

Iron Mountain’s solutions can rapidly ‘triage’ data and prepare it for migration. The creation of a rich set of metadata improves ‘findability’ and migration project timeframes can be reduced by as much as 10x.

Cyber breach incidents: Iron Mountain’s solutions can proactively identify areas containing large amounts of ‘at risk’ content and find the ‘smoking guns’ that need to be remediated to minimize the risk of information falling into the wrong hands (internally and externally).

What you gain

• A rationalized, cleaned up body of content for big data, artificial intelligence (AI) programs.
• Ability to know what you have and find what you need more easily.
• Informed decisions about what to keep and where to keep it.
• Position to prevent data loss, including privacy breaches and theft of high-value information.
• Better use of time and improved service responsiveness.
• Applications operating with desirable speed; more productive users and improved customer satisfaction.
• Smaller footprint and reduced IT costs associated with software licenses, hardware, energy consumption, technical administration, and backups.

Customer success story #1

A top 50 U.S. insurance company embarked on an unstructured content remediation project to:

• Reduce costs and risk
• Improve management of business-critical data
• Make better information management decisions for unstructured data
• Develop a beginning-to-end disposal process at the insurance company in question
• 82% of files pertaining to one department were disposed, 18% were retained to meet retention requirements. In another department, 87% of files that met the 10-year retention were disposed. The remaining 13% have been retained to meet business needs.
• Output files from decommissioned software systems were identified and disposed as part of a system decommissioning process.
• The same tools which enabled the ROT remediation were also used to comply with that state’s financial services cyber security requirements by identifying sensitive data (e.g., PII, PHI, and PCI) and enabling rules-based treatment of this data.

Customer success story #2

A Fortune 1000 company had over 400TB of unstructured data distributed across six data centers and was looking to:

• Prepare legacy data for migration to the cloud (M365)
• Minimize the amount of redundant data stored
• Implement corporate policies to secure and protect data throughout it’s lifecycle

For this company:

• 50% of data was identified as ROT and remediated in line with company policy
• 450,000 files containing sensitive and personal information were identified and remediated
• 120 million files had sensitivity labels applied within four days: previously over 1,000 users had manually applied 300,000 labels in nine months