Minimising a Company's Sensitive Data Footprint:

Best Practices and Benefits of Partnering with an Implementation Specialist

Introduction:

In today's world, companies collect vast amounts of data, which can be costly to store and risky in terms of potential data breaches. Therefore, minimizing a company's sensitive data footprint is essential to reduce storage costs, data breach risks, and non-compliance issues.

The Challenge of Unstructured Data

More than 80% of the data stored by organizations is unstructured, which makes it challenging to minimize. Unstructured data is in the form of emails, file attachments, images, PDFs, and other types of data that do not have predefined fields like a structured database. Moreover, this data is usually redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT), which makes it meaningless after 90 days.

Incorporating Privacy by Design Principles

To address these concerns, companies should incorporate privacy by design principles into their products and services from the outset. This can be achieved by using data minimization practices as part of standard operating procedures. By analyzing metadata to identify when data stops being necessary, companies can establish a deletion method and apply retention periods to their data. This can be done by archiving or deleting files after they cross a certain time threshold.

Centralized Data Governance Tool

To efficiently operationalize data retention and minimization, companies can use a centralized data governance tool. This tool can help determine the most accurate set of retention policies for the organization based on relevant regulations, automate the retention and deletion process, flag and identify any violations of retention rules, and decide whether data needs to be deleted, anonymized, or de-identified.

Incorporate privacy by design principles and data minimization practices into your organization's products and services from the outset.

Use a centralized data governance tool to efficiently operationalize data retention and minimization.

Benefits of Partnering with an Implementation Specialist

Partnering with a specialized organization like the Data Privacy Group can greatly benefit your company in achieving efficient and effective implementation of OneTrust's Data Discovery solution. As an implementation specialist, the Data Privacy Group has the expertise and experience needed to guide your organization in identifying unstructured data across your entire IT infrastructure and utilizing machine learning to automate policy rules and label data accurately.

Shortening Time to Value

By working with The Data Privacy Group, your organization can significantly shorten your time to value and accelerate your path to achieving the desired results of reducing sensitive data footprint and ensuring compliance with data retention policies. The Data Privacy Group can help customize OneTrust's Data Discovery solution to fit the unique needs of your organization and provide ongoing support to monitor data over time and track performance with advanced analytics.

Partner with the The DPG to achieve efficient and effective implementation of OneTrust's Data Discovery solution.

Peace of Mind

Partnering with the Data Privacy Group can ultimately provide your organization with the peace of mind that your sensitive data is being handled with the utmost care and in accordance with the latest data privacy regulations. With the expertise and experience of a specialized implementation partner, your organization can efficiently operationalize data retention policies and effectively manage data in all structured, semi-structured and unstructured environments, ultimately reducing costs, risks and ensuring compliance.

Contact the The DPG today to learn how our implementation expertise and experience can benefit your organization in achieving efficient and effective data retention and minimization.