Dark Data.
The term may sound ominous and mysterious, like something out of deep space. Analyst firm Gartner defines dark data as "the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes. Similar to dark matter in physics, dark data often comprises most organizations' universe of information assets."
Today we are announcing Symantec Data Insight 4.0 to help IT administrators take back control of dark data. Lack of insight into this information is due to the rapid growth of unstructured dark data, which is generally poorly managed and stored. Many data centers literally have petabytes of unstructured information (documents, presentations, spreadsheets and emails) that an organization accumulates over time and is in the dark when it comes to its content, ownership and usage.
With this latest version of Data Insight, Symantec continues to integrate its storage and security offerings, providing organizations a unified approach to data governance. Data Insight 4.0 represents the progress on Symantec’s commitment to integrate solutions, making it easier for organizations to protect and manage their information.
Symantec Data Insight helps organizations improve unstructured data governance through actionable intelligence into data ownership, usage and access. Data Insight’s reporting, analytics and visualization capabilities give organizations an understanding of what data exists, how the data is used, who owns the data and who has access to the data. These insights drive efforts in efficiency and cost reduction across the data lifecycle as well as drive protection of sensitive data and compliance, resulting in reduced risk.
With Data Insight, organizations can:
- Identify business owners of data
- Understand what unstructured data they have to drive efficiencies and reduce cost
- Maintain regulatory compliance for information access, use and retention
- Ensure information is protected from exposure to unauthorized individuals
These insights will help IT organizations engage the business, drive remediation efforts and create effective information governance policies to deal with unstructured data growth.
Data Insight 4.0 integrates with Data Loss Prevention to secure high value data and with Enterprise Vault for archiving and retention to provide unified data governance. Through integration with Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Data Insight provides proactive protection of intellectual property across collaboration repositories such as file shares and SharePoint. Organizations can use Data Insight’s analytics to secure collaboration through tracking and monitoring of sensitive data usage, detecting outlier users and insider threats, and securing access to sensitive data.
Data Insight also helps fulfill compliance requirements by auditing access for confidentiality and integrity, identifying data owners and then holding them accountable for compliance on data access requirements. Organizations can also quickly discover orphan or stale data and manage archiving and retention using Symantec Enterprise Vault, or create custom actions that delete or migrate the data to reduce cost and footprint.
With Data Insight, organizations can shine the light on the black hole of unstructured dark data, helping it to provide the proper business value it should.
Learn more about Symantec Data Insight at: http://go.symantec.com/datainsight
Resources:
- Data Sheet: Data Insight 4.0
- Solution Brief: Information Governance Solution from Symantec
- SlideShare: Data Insight
- Product Page: Symantec Data Loss Prevention
- Product Page: Symantec Enterprise Vault