Today’s knowledge workers create information at a breathtaking rate. Email, documents, video, audio, chats and collaboration platforms are all part of the standard kit for today’s mobile workforce. And while the threat of “big data” — massive amounts of data inside an organization — has cast a shadow over IT and legal departments for several years, the real challenge can oftentimes be the variety. It’s why we believe the real challenge is less about “big data” and more about “new data types” — that quickly defeat traditional collection and review tools and strategies.
It would be challenging enough if organizations only had to get their digital hands and policies around the more common enterprise applications, such as Microsoft’s Office 365 (with 70 million monthly active users and growing) and G Suite from Google (adopted by more than 60% of the Fortune 500). But it is the explosion in cloud-based applications that creates the biggest headaches — and greatest vulnerabilities — for today’s IT teams. Whether Slack, Trello, Box, Dropbox or Evernote, potentially discoverable data is being produced and stored in a dizzying array of applications. And the next “big-thing” app — that no one has heard of, but everyone will be using in six months — is just getting started today.
