As one of the longest standing segments in the global economy, the energy industry is deeply rooted in its processes and conventions. Aside from environmental protection policies, it is not as regulated when compared with health care and financial services organizations. Without a regulatory strong arm forcing certain practices, the energy industry has felt less pressure to adjust to the emerging challenges of today’s growing data volumes and new data privacy laws. Many operate in a culture that tends to be slow to adopt new approaches in the face of economic, legal and regulatory change.

Due to the above and other industry factors, counsel at oil and gas companies are often sitting on large volumes of information, which can be problematic for many reasons. Data hoarding presents challenges across data protection initiatives, electronic discovery activities for litigation and investigations, and importantly, compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other global data privacy legislation. Further, energy companies are ripe for data breaches, and tend to face higher costs per data breach than the average corporation.