In a blog piece for the Wall Street Journal, Brian Finch, partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and Brian Fox, principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers, suggest practicing a lean “data diet” could help organizations improve their “cyber health.”
Mr. Finch and Mr. Fox write that when organizations have less data to protect, they can better manage the security profile of the truly valuable data, including who accesses it.
Additionally, they suggest lessening the volume of stored data decreases the chance that information is exposed, “not necessarily high-value intellectual property or protected personal or health information, but merely embarrassing communications or carelessly-worded personal documents.”
Keeping endless amounts of data is what Mr. Finch and Mr. Fox call “zombie data,” or data that a company doesn’t even know it has but could be harmful if discovered and used by a third party. “Obviously the less harmful information that exists, the better off a company is,” they write.
There is also a monetary incentive to trimming excess data. Organizations will need to allocate less funds to protecting and securing data if there is less of it, the authors write. A judicious approach to storing select data means organizations can adopt and implement more techniques to protect what they do keep, they say.
A positive externality of such a data diet is the benefits it provides to big data analytics, say Mr. Finch and Mr. Fox. “Regardless of the power of advanced analytics, it is undeniable that one can get to better analytics faster if one knows that the data under review is high-value and high-integrity, and when one knows something about the content in advance,” they write. “Cutting away at known junk data therefore serves to increase the fidelity of all your data and position you better for reaping the benefits of advanced analytics.”
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