The Dangers of Dark Data & How to Securely Dispose of Them?
Objective: Dark data and its possibilities have continued to dominate talks, but it is impossible to overlook the risks that come with it. Like structured data, dark data must be expensively stored and is vulnerable to leaks and cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it isn’t taken into account while creating data destruction policies. The blog will discuss dark data, its dangers, and how crucial data deletion is to reducing those dangers.
“That much information is currently created every two days,” stated Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, in 2010. “There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the birth of civilization and 2003.” The underlying message was unmistakable: we are producing enormous amounts of data at a dizzying pace. It’s interesting to note that 90% of this data is black and unstructured, according to IDC (International Data Corporation). IT leaders claim that dark data has immense potential, but for the majority of organisations, the emphasis is mainly on gaining value from structured data. This enormous pool of unsecured, idle data is consuming enormous amounts of storage and has the potential to be either a very valuable asset or a very costly burden.
Complete Overview of Dark Data
Dark data is information that organisations acquire and keep but does not use for commercial operations. Every business can classify dark data differently, but anything communicated over the internet has the potential to turn dark at some point. A few examples of dark data:
- Location-tagging information
- Survey data in its raw form
- Call recordings from customers
- Emails from the past and their attachments
- Finished or abandoned marketing campaigns
- Observational material from video feeds
- Ancient documents
- Historical employee data
- Internet material that has been saved
- Identical data in several copies
Also, although IoT devices gather a lot of data, it isn’t really useful for business. This data was initially acquired with the intention of deriving some value from it or as part of a general information-gathering activity while dealing with clients. The most important data will eventually become dated and turn into dark data. It will continue to be dangerous to store dark data unless firms establish explicit policies about data retention and disposal that include dark data handling.
What Are the Dangers and Threats of Dark data?
Businesses face a number of difficulties as a result of the presence of dark data in storage systems. Hence, comprehending them may be essential to creating policies that will protect against the risks put on by the mentioned problems:
Data Security Breaches:
Organizations must always manage data securely, even dark data or data at rest, in accordance with data regulations and privacy requirements. In the event that sensitive data contained in dark data is hacked in any way, it may be harmful to the organisation and result in non-compliance. However, not following through with rules and regulations may have negative legal and financial repercussions, harming the reputation of the company and its brand image.
Compromise Professional Information:
Dark data may contain direct information or hints to information that is confidential, and strategic, for use in business research, partnership modules, or operations; if this information is accidentally revealed, the value of the company and investor confidence may be destroyed.
A Higher TCO:
The Total cost of ownership (TCO), which includes backup, accessibility, and preparedness, would grow substantially with dark data requiring large quantities of storage space. This expense is a liability that has no anticipated use. One terabyte of data might cost more than $3000 each year, according to estimates.
Environmental Risk:
To store data, data centres need a lot of electricity. According to IEA (International Energy Agency) estimates, the need for data centres currently accounts for 1% of the world’s electricity production and is projected to increase to 1/5 by 2025. Dark data consumes a lot of storage and considerably increases global warming-related carbon emissions on a global scale.
Loss of Opportunity:
Data collecting is expensive, and firms lose opportunities if the data is not used or is used inefficiently.
Companies should take action to guarantee that dark data is swiftly erased before it turns the aforementioned concerns into reality because they lack the knowledge, resources, and technology necessary to extract value from it.
How Does Data Destruction Help in Reducing Dark Data Risks?
Dark data could include private information that, if leaked, could result in financial, legal, and brand reputational damage. By creating a thorough data destruction policy that includes dark unstructured data deletion, these dangers must be reduced. As was covered in earlier articles, data destruction is the process of permanently deleting data from storage devices to render it unrecoverable. Data Destruction can be performed in numerous ways, however, we recommend using an overwriting software like CubexSoft Data Wipe Software that is NIST approved and can help fulfil compliance with global laws and regulations.
How Can CubexSoft Data Erasure Help Destroy Dark Data?
Permanent Data Eraser:
The data in every sector of the storage device will be overwritten by an overwriting programme using pseudo-random number binary 1s and 0s. Data is ensured to be overwritten so that it is permanently deleted from the device and cannot be recovered, not even in a forensic lab setting.
Proof of Destruction:
In order to help businesses with audits and compliance, the software provides erasure reports that are maintained on an easily accessible cloud repository.
Data destruction makes it simpler for enterprises to use dark data across the organisation by making sure that it is permanently deleted from all storage devices, including SSDs, HDDs, PCs, USBs, servers, etc. Also, after the data is deleted, the risks related to dark data are reduced.
Conclusion
Due to its alleged worth and high acquisition costs, businesses are inherently attracted to keeping to dark data. That continues to be the main reason why they are forced to keep this data on hand for extended periods of time without having any sort of use for it in mind. Although there is no doubting the significance of dark data, it is currently not possible to extract anything useful from it due to the work, technology, cost, and energy needed. Dark data should be destroyed as soon as possible rather being kept over time since the hazards are greater than the rewards. Businesses would be wise to include scheduled dark data removal in their data lifecycle management as part of their data disposal policy.
