Shedding Light on Dark Data
In the vast expanse of digital information, there exists a shadowy term called dark data – a trove of unstructured or unutilized data lurking within organizational repositories. Despite its ominous name, dark data harbors untapped insights and potential, making it a valuable yet often overlooked resource for organizations.
What is Dark Data?
Dark data encompasses information assets that organizations collect, process, and store during regular business activities but fail to leverage for insights or decision-making. This data often remains dormant, residing in siloed systems, forgotten databases, or unstructured formats such as emails, documents, and multimedia files. Dark data takes many forms, and can include incomplete data, unlabeled data, improperly formatted data, expired data, biased data, or even data that has yet to be discovered. Unlike structured data, which can be readily analyzed and utilized, dark data languishes in obscurity, obscuring valuable insights and opportunities.
Dangers of Dark Data
Understanding and harnessing dark data is imperative for organizations seeking to remain competitive and innovative in today's data-driven landscape. There are multiple implications for the ongoing maintenance, storage, and ingestion of dark data. To fully understand these concepts, let us unpack some of the major impacts of dark data:
1. Optimization of Resources: Large amounts of dark data lead to poor data usage and management of storage resources. Dark data does not provide business value, but still maintains costs to store, secure, and manage. Dark data stands in the way of storage consolidation and system optimization for any organization.
2. Carbon Impact of Data: The carbon impact of dark data is an emerging concern, with organizations projected to emit significant CO2 due to its presence. Sustainable data management solutions can mitigate this impact, aligning with organizations' environmental responsibilities. In 2020, study conducted by Vertitas Technology had projected that in that year 6.4M tons of CO2 will be pumped into the environment due to the presence of dark data.
3. Accuracy of Data Analysis: The accuracy of data analysis is contingent upon the accuracy of the data itself. Organizations must discern critical data for their business requirements to ensure trustworthy insights. Moreover, considerations such as data governance and privacy models influence the acceptance and trustworthiness of transformed data.
4. Increased Privacy and Security Risks: Unmanaged dark data poses a significant risk in terms of compliance, security, and privacy. Regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and CCPA mandate organizations to ensure the proper management and protection of all data. By nature, dark data is difficult to protect as it usually off-the-radar and organizations cannot protect data assets that they cannot detect or interpret.
Hidden Opportunities
All organizations have an opportunity to reduce the amount of dark data impacting their business. Let's unpack what steps we can take to correct or eliminate dark data:
- Assessment and Inventory: Conduct a thorough assessment to identify dark data and categorize its sources. Develop an inventory to track the types and locations of dark data, and plans to resolve. Based on the risk the data imposes by staying dark, tackle the most critical cases of dark data for best results.
- Data Governance and Transformation: Implement robust data governance frameworks to ensure transparent and ethical data transformation processes. Especially for dark data that is incomplete or unlabeled, through governance this data can be identified and resolved. Governance is also the best measure to make sure new data in an organization does not become dark.
- Prioritize through Sustainability: Foster collaboration between data and sustainability teams to integrate environmental considerations into data management practices. Invest in innovative technologies and talent to maximize the value of transformed dark data while minimizing risks.
Overall, by focusing on dark data and embracing sustainability, organizations can unlock valuable insights, mitigate risks, and contribute to a more environmentally responsible future. Through conscientious management and transformation, dark data can illuminate pathways to growth and sustainability.