Transvault Cloud Data Curation Datasheet
Discover, classify, and prepare unstructured data for management across your DMS, file shares, and collaboration tools so you can reduce risk, control costs, and support AI initiatives with confidence.
How to Tackle a Petabyte of Unstructured Data
A petabyte of unstructured data sounds like a storage problem.
The first challenge is visibility.
Across file shares, legacy platforms, email archives, collaboration tools and cloud storage, organisations have accumulated enormous volumes of information over many years. Some of it is valuable. Some needs to be retained. Some contains sensitive or regulated information. And a significant proportion may no longer need to exist at all.
The difficulty is knowing which is which.
Moving everything into a new platform simply moves the problem. Deleting data without understanding it creates unnecessary risk. The answer is to Know First.
Before deciding what to retain, migrate or delete, establish what you have and what obligations apply to it.
Start with policy, not technology
Before analysing terabytes or petabytes of information, establish the rules. Your retention, deletion, governance and legal hold policies should determine how information is treated. That means being able to answer some fundamental questions:
– What information needs to be retained?
– For how long?
– What can legitimately be deleted?
– What information is subject to legal hold?
– How should sensitive or regulated information be handled?
– Who has authority to approve disposal?
Clear policies give the project a consistent basis for decisions and help ensure that disposal can be explained and defended.
Understand what you’re dealing with
Unstructured data rarely arrives neatly labelled.
You may discover decades-old files, duplicated content, obsolete formats, abandoned user folders, data without an obvious owner, information with missing metadata and files that can no longer be opened.
This is where many cleanup projects become difficult. Before acting at scale, establish how these exceptions will be handled. What happens when ownership is unclear, a retention date cannot be established or a file is corrupt?
Agreeing the approach before remediation begins prevents thousands of individual exceptions from bringing the project to a halt later.
Know where retained data is going
Cleaning data doesn’t automatically mean deleting it. Some information will still have business, regulatory, operational or historical value. So before moving anything, decide where retained information belongs. That could mean an active business system, archive, records management platform, lower-cost storage or another controlled repository.
Choose a destination that supports the information’s purpose, retention requirements, access needs and security controls.
Find the ROT
One of the biggest opportunities is identifying ROT data: Redundant. Obsolete. Trivial.
Think duplicate documents, superseded versions, temporary files, forgotten downloads, abandoned working folders and information retained long beyond its useful life. At petabyte scale, even a relatively small percentage of ROT can represent a significant amount of storage.
But the objective shouldn’t simply be to delete as much as possible. It should be to identify information that can be removed safely, consistently and defensibly.
Configure around the questions you need answered
Technology can analyse huge volumes of information far faster than people can. But technology is only useful when you know what you’re asking it to find. Your governance requirements should therefore drive your discovery and classification process.
Depending on the organisation, that might include identifying:
– ROT data
– duplicate information
– aged or expired content
– sensitive or personal information
– regulated data
– information subject to retention requirements
– orphaned data
– active business records
– information subject to legal hold
The results should help you establish what requires attention, which rules apply and what action is appropriate.
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Start small
Begin with a representative dataset. Choose a department, repository, shared drive, user group or business function and use it to test the process. This allows you to validate classification rules, reporting, workflows and decision-making before applying them to significantly larger volumes. It also gives stakeholders confidence. Once the results are reliable and the process is repeatable, you can scale.
Discover. Understand. Decide. Act. Then repeat.
Put people around the data
Technology can identify and classify information. It cannot always determine its business value. That requires context.
Data owners and subject-matter experts should therefore be involved in deciding what happens to information within their area of responsibility. They don’t necessarily need to review every individual file. Instead, establish clear rules around what can be processed automatically, what can be sampled and what requires human review.
This combination of technology, policy and human judgement allows remediation to scale without removing accountability.
Make every decision traceable
When information is retained, migrated or deleted, maintain an audit trail. You should be able to demonstrate:
– What was discovered.
– How it was classified.
– Which policy applied.
– Who authorised the decision.
– What action was taken.
– When it happened.
These records provide evidence of how decisions were made, particularly when dealing with sensitive, regulated or legally significant information.
Don’t let the mountain grow back
A major data cleanup shouldn’t be the end of the process. It should change how information is managed going forward.
Employees create files, duplicate documents, use new applications and introduce new sources of information every day. And AI is accelerating that growth further. Without ongoing visibility and governance, today’s clean environment can quickly become tomorrow’s petabyte problem.
Regular discovery and monitoring can help organisations identify information retained beyond its requirements, detect sensitive content in unexpected locations and assess whether governance policies are working.
This can also lower storage and eDiscovery costs, limit the information exposed during a cyber incident and improve the quality of data available to AI systems.
From data mountain to data advantage
At Transvault, we believe organisations should Know First.
Understand what data you have, where it is, what value it holds and what risk it represents. Then make an informed decision about what happens next. Because when you’re dealing with a petabyte of unstructured data, the safest first step isn’t moving it.
It’s knowing what’s there.
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