Post By: Adam Turteltaub

“Dark data” sounds ominous, and as Peter Bauman (LinkedIn), Founder and CEO of ActiveNav explains in this podcast, it can lead to great risks for organizations.

Dard data is essentially data which organizations collect as a part of their business processes but don’t necessarily have a plan to use. It is also data that rarely gets thrown out, instead residing indefinitely on devices and services. It includes weblogs, tracking data, surveillance footage, email correspondence, chatroom conversations, presentations and old spreadsheets.

This data is typically unstructured, and often it is very opaque.

It also carries significant risks including the need to access it during litigation, and it even may create privacy issues.

How can you get a handle on this data? Shine a light on it. Determine where it is in your organization and start building a data inventory that classifies the data.

Next determine what is worth keeping and what needs to be destroyed. And, for the data worth keeping, take the trouble to classify it.

Most of all, treat this as an ongoing issue to manage. Data tends to collect itself, in many ways, and organizations need to be aware of what it has and what it’s for. That requires the creation of better policies for collecting and managing data.

Those policies need to be pragmatic, reflecting both business needs and the inevitable collection of ever more amounts of data.

Listen in to learn more about dark data and how you can start bringing it into the light.