Discovering Dark Data - An Elusive Security & Privacy Risk in the Cloud

Dark data discovery is the information assets businesses acquire, process, and retain during routine business activities but often fail to employ for other purposes.

Dark data is all of an organization's unused, undiscovered, and untapped data. It includes anything from machine data to server log files to unstructured data collected from social media. Dark data is produced due to consumers' daily online interactions with numerous devices and systems. Examples of regularly used company data include names, addresses, phone numbers, and identification numbers.

In a typical organization and shared storage environment, between 60 and 85 percent of unstructured data is dark. These are documents that belonged to a former employee of the business; no one has accessed them in years.