Mining and Infrastructure Solution Provider Partners with EncompaaS

Overview

EncompaaS is partnering with a global mining and infrastructure solution provider to help them discover, understand and rationalise information held in over 17,000 SharePoint sites and address growing data complexity and storage costs.

Challenge

A leading mining and infrastructure solution provider with over 12,000 staff was experiencing major challenges with unmanaged data sprawl and associated storage costs. The organisation was paying a significant amount of money for data storage, due to the large volume of content that was proliferating across its geographically dispersed operations.

There was also poor visibility of the type and location of content being created and captured in SharePoint premium storage. Additional uncertainty regarding whether these repositories contained sensitive information, such as Intellectual Property or Personally Identifiable Information, and whether this was properly secured and governed was also a key issue. With the organisation’s content volume growing at a rate of 500 gigabytes per month in SharePoint alone, EncompaaS and Chrome Consulting have been engaged to address this problem at scale.

Key Pain Points

Rising Storage Costs

All content – regardless of its business value – was being stored in premium Microsoft storage without the ability to assess business value and move content to more appropriate and cost-effective tiered storage.

Poor Visibility

Lack of visibility over what type of content was being stored and its location across the organisation.

Risk of Non-Compliance

Uncertain where sensitive content was being stored and if it was being appropriately managed and governed.

Data Value Not Realised

Limited understanding as to what content held business usefulness and what was redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT).

Solution

The organisation engaged EncompaaS and Chrome Consulting (a key implementation partner of EncompaaS) to discover, understand and rationalise information held in over 17,000 SharePoint sites.

The EncompaaS platform uses a combination of AI technologies to find, enrich and organise structured, unstructured and semi-structured data into a normalised data quality foundation. This enables automated governance at scale so information can be de-risked and used for upstream processes.

In the initial stage of work, information in over 70 repositories was discovered, enabling the organisation to move forward and assess over 13 million items.

Using the EncompaaS platform, the organisation has since classified previously undiscovered ‘dark data’, safely removed ROT data and identified and secured high-risk sensitive data. This has enabled the organisation to significantly reduce its data volume, lower risk and decrease storage costs. In addition, an ongoing data retention strategy has been implemented whereby automated data governance policies are applied, aligned with the organisation’s objectives, to ensure ongoing compliance.

The organisation is now working with EncompaaS and Chrome Consulting to accelerate implementation across the remaining SharePoint sites after a successful first stage of work.