ROT is digital documentation in an organisation that has no business or legal value.

It is usually appears as multiple copies of the same information, outdated information that is no longer relevant or extraneous information.

Why is ROT harmful for your organisation?

1. It creates a need for excessive storage leading to increased infrastructure and maintenance costs.
2. It impairs employees ability to demonstrate compliance with regulations or respond to discovery requests.
3. It impairs employees ability to quickly access the right information and make data based decisions quickly.
4. Outdated information that should be legally deleted presents a liability risk to the organisation
5. ROT increases your attack surface and increases vulnerability to cyber attack.

The Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM) reports that on average, half of an organisation’s retained information has no business value. The Compliance, Governance, and Oversight Council (CGOC) estimates that a company with 10 petabytes of data could be spending as much as $34.5 million on data that could be deleted.

70 – 80% of the data created in the last two years is unstructured, unidentified and uncontained data.

66% of IT professionals say security is their greatest concern when adopting a cloud computing strategy.

There has never been a greater need to be able to discover and identify your data and protect surfaces regardless of where data resides.

The first step when creating an information governance plan is to discover and classify all existing information and determine what has business value and/or is needed for legal reasons. This does not need to be a laborious manual process.

Everything else is ROT.

Getvisibility AI models allow faster and more accurate classification than traditional methods, providing greater context for security and compliance.

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