In today’s digital world, the amount of unstructured data—emails, files stored in Box, Microsoft 365 documents, fileshares, and more—has skyrocketed. While this information can hold immense value for businesses, managing it manually is no longer feasible or effective. Companies are grappling with complex legal and regulatory requirements, skyrocketing storage costs, and growing cybersecurity threats. Manual efforts to classify, retain and dispose of information are no longer sufficient to ensure compliance and safeguard information. More than ever, organizations must adopt automated solutions to efficiently manage unstructured information.
Regulatory Imperatives for Automating Information Governance
With the enforcement of regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA/CPRA, businesses face strict compliance demands when handling personal and sensitive data. Non-compliance not only damages a company's reputation but also leads to steep financial penalties. In 2023, GDPR fines surpassed €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion), highlighting the aggressive stance regulators are taking. Meanwhile, the SEC charged 10 firms with widespread recordkeeping failures, resulting in $79 million in fines, following over $1.8 billion in penalties imposed the previous year. This trend makes it clear: companies must prioritize automated governance to avoid serious consequences.
Reducing Costs, Risks and ROT through Automation
The explosion of unstructured data also brings considerable costs. Gartner estimates that 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, and much of it is ROT—redundant, obsolete, or trivial. Keeping such data unnecessarily inflates storage costs without adding value. Automated systems allow companies to classify information in real-time, eliminating ROT and minimizing both costs and risks. Furthermore, these systems identify high-risk data such as intellectual property (IP) or personally identifiable information (PII), ensuring it is protected appropriately.
Managing Information Amid Rapid Employee Turnover
Employee turnover is another challenge that companies face. With over 40% of the global workforce changing jobs every four years, businesses need automated systems that retain institutional knowledge while making critical data easily accessible. When employees leave, they often take crucial knowledge with them, but their data remains. Automated tools, such as indexing and search functionalities, ensure that departing employees’ data is preserved and accessible, preventing loss of business insights.
Automation in Mergers & Acquisitions: A Critical Need
In a world where mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are frequent—global M&A deal values hit $3 trillion in 2023—the need for automated information separation has never been greater. Automation helps classify, purge, and separate unstructured data, ensuring that only necessary, high-quality information moves forward in a transaction, avoiding the transfer of ROT into the new organization.
Navigating Litigation, Audits, and Investigations
Corporate litigation, regulatory audits, and investigations require quick and accurate access to relevant data. Manually sorting through massive amounts of unstructured information is time-consuming and inefficient. With automated systems, companies can perform rapid in-place searches, ensuring they meet legal deadlines, conduct early case assessments, and reduce the costs associated with lengthy discovery processes.
Unlocking the Value of Unstructured Data
Beyond compliance and risk management, unstructured data holds untapped potential to drive business value. Data-driven decision-making is becoming a competitive differentiator, with companies that excel in this area being 23 times more likely to acquire customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable. However, without the right tools, much of this data remains inaccessible. Automated systems not only make unstructured data searchable and organized but also prepare it for analysis, enabling companies to harness its value for innovation and enhanced customer experiences.
Why Automating Unstructured Data Management is Urgent
With unstructured data growing rapidly and business landscapes becoming more complex, companies can no longer afford manual information governance methods. Automating unstructured data management ensures legal and regulatory compliance, reduces storage costs, protects sensitive data, and enables faster responses to litigation and audits. Most importantly, it allows businesses to make data-driven decisions that enhance their competitive edge.
Why Partner with Kahn
Managing unstructured data is no longer a choice—it's a business imperative. By adopting automated systems, companies can not only reduce risk and costs but also unlock the full value of their information assets. Kahn Consulting has been at the forefront of leveraging technology to streamline information governance for over two decades. We partner with industry-leading solutions that provide cost-effective, scalable tools to help businesses take control of their unstructured data. Our team of experts bridges the gap between governance policies and cutting-edge automation, enabling organizations to manage retention and disposition seamlessly. With Kahn, you're equipped to navigate today's information challenges while preparing for tomorrow's opportunities in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
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