Most organizations would admit that their data could be better managed. In fact, most would say that their data probably isn’t “managed” at all and has been haphazardly collecting in a lot of different places over multiple years.

Heureka has proven that both data intelligence and risk can be extracted from unstructured data that is already on hand but, because of lack of priority, financing or comprehensive tools, has never been properly evaluated. As we’ve noted before, gaining true data visibility means knowing where data is, who’s handling it and for what purpose.

PwC Marketing Leader Matthew Lieberman has authored an article in Forbes about how to get the most value out of your data. The good news is that many organizations are at least acknowledging the issue: according to a PwC survey cited by Lieberman, 86% of executives agree with the statement, “We are in a race with competitors to extract value from data.” But they would be wise to figure out how to actually extract that immense value:

Data Value By the Numbers:

• $2 billion: Amount the average Fortune 1000 company could boost revenue by increasing data usability by just 10%.
• $55,900: Revenue increase per employee realized by the same 10% boost.

Source: University of Texas

The Forbes article lists three steps for extracting value from existing data:

1. Assess: Determine the origin of the data and who has access to it.

2. Strategize: Decide whether to proceed with a data use case.

3. Operationalize: Implement new security and privacy measures and update IT systems.

Extracting value using Heureka

Heureka was developed to specifically address the growing need to gain control of and insight into critical, unstructured data that is both a value and a risk, and to improve upon the economics of a resource-intensive process to manage that data.

Unstructured data has become one of the greatest risks within the corporate world, so our goal is to empower clients to better manage their own unstructured data. Organizations who fail to act on their unstructured data have the potential for greater fines and regulatory action with little excuse for not managing their data.

The Heureka process goes like this: 1. Identify 2. Tag or classify 3. Remediate by moving offline, quarantine or deletion (To date, Heureka has helped organizations clean out tens of thousands of dollars worth of risky files in a matter of days.)

Step 1 – Identify

Once installed, Heureka’s endpoint indexing engine immediately goes to work creating a full text and metadata index of the endpoint (desktop, laptop or file share). Files and data remain in-place along with the index itself and risky data is automatically identified. Heureka does not centralize databases thus reducing infrastructure needs and network bandwidth.

Step 2 – Classify/Tag

As data is being indexed it also runs through Heureka’s automatic classification engine. Heureka automatically identifies and tags files containing PII risk such as credit cards, social security numbers and bank routing information. All risk is then reported back to Heureka’s Command Console risk dashboard. Users can instantly view the riskiest endpoints in an environment along with 30 day trends. When file-level investigation is necessary, Heureka users can almost instantly query any system to show the files containing risk.

Users may also want to manually classify documents. Heureka’s ACT (Advanced Classification & Tagging) allows users to create their own classification tags and keeps all systems in sync with a global tagging library. Heureka’s Shared Intelligence workflow also allows intelligence from external sources such as AI, Machine Learning, or E-Discovery systems to pass classification tags into the global library.

Step 3 – Remediate

Remediation of risk is one of the most important components to the data governance workflow. Heureka’s Central Command Console allows users to collect, quarantine or delete files from any endpoint to complete the process and most importantly protect and control data.

With the proper tools and expertise, you can improve overall data handling and extract value from existing data. Heureka allows you to gain insight and control over your unstructured data at a level never thought possible.

For more information, schedule a demo today.