Here are some of the meaningful purposes that unstructured data can serve to help organizations succeed, grow, and scale.
Optimized Customer Experience
Unstructured data comprises customers’ emails, customer support queries, reviews, live chat histories, and more. By gaining insights into customers’ behavior and preferences, organizations can better enhance and optimize their customers’ experience.
By linking their chat history, phone calls, or customer support queries, CS teams can transform the communications into tickets, and respond to their customers accurately, and in a timely fashion.
By harnessing automation and unstructured data analytics, teams can ensure that customers are getting the right type of support that they expect.
Enhanced Marketing Intelligence
Data transparency is imperative to bring about significant improvements in marketing strategies and execution. By allowing AI or ML-driven tools to analyze Big Data or unstructured data, such as online reviews, customers’ rants on different platforms, survey reports, analytics teams can better assess trends in the market, how the current products and offerings are performing, and what the competition is navigating the trend.
By analyzing these different aspects, marketing intelligence teams can better assess where they are currently standing, what strategies they need to overcome the competition, and how they can better serve their customers.
Top Challenges with Unstructured Data
As unstructured data proliferates at an accelerating pace, it tends to bring on many challenges
Lack of Visibility
The growing volume of unstructured data and the resulting data silos further create security and privacy risks that may lead to imminent cyber threats. As organizations can’t protect any data unless they know its location, severity, and sensitivity, this leads to security risks that put not only the unregistered data at risk but also the data that is registered or indexed.
Take, for instance, the excessive privilege threats. When organizations deal with large volumes of data, they tend to lose sight of the data they owned, the personnel having access to the data, and the existing security protocols applicable or applied for data protection. As a result, organizations open their systems and resources to threats like privilege abuse, data leaks, and unintended security breaches.
Changing Privacy Laws
Initially, data protection and privacy laws revolved around governing government entities, the healthcare sector, or financial institutions. But in recent years, privacy laws have tightened their grip, especially when it comes to governing private sector organizations as they collect large volumes of data for consumer analytics and other business-critical purposes.
Over the years, data protection and privacy regulations have improved and become harsher significantly, imposing heavy fines and strict penalties for violations. There are now more regulations concerning data retention, data minimization, and governance. The longer an organization retains the data, including the sensitive data, than it should be, the more likely it is for them to receive fines.
How to Deal With Unstructured Data
Leaving unstructured data as is can be detrimental to an organization as they may face sky-high storage and manpower expenses, heavy fines from regulatory authorities, or loss of customer trust. Here are some effective ways organizations can manage unstructured data for security and privacy compliance.
Identify Data Sources
Lack of visibility is the topmost concern of every organization with unstructured data. Therefore, it is imperative to start by locating all the resources, systems, and applications across legacy, multi-cloud networks or data lakes where data could be located.
To be able to discover and catalog data assets faster and accurately, ensure that the data asset discovery tool offers seamless integration with myriad systems, networks, and applications. The tool should be able to discover data assets (including shadow data assets) across cloud-native (data lakes & multi-cloud) and on-prem environments. Tools with the added functionality of discovering advanced metadata can enable organizations to gain better insights into the sensitivity level or governance status of those assets so that effective measures can be taken accordingly, such as encrypting any data asset that may contain sensitive information.
Discover & Classify Data
Classification is an integral part of the entire data discovery and management process. Data classification enables organizations to have a better look and understanding of the priority of the data, its sensitivity, risk level, and privacy use-cases.
To ensure the effective and efficient classification of unstructured data thoroughly define the categories of data that you need to identify using rich classifiers, such as NER, Luhn, Naive Bayes, and contextual classification, to name a few.
With robotic automation powered by AI, ML, and NLP technologies, organizations can ensure the highly-accurate classification of a multitude of data, including Big Data formats like AVRO and Parquet.
Apply Relevant Labeling
Security-Based Labeling
Using tools like Azure and Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) categorize unstructured data according to its sensitivity label, such as Public, Confidential, Shared, etc. Security-based labeling enables teams to determine the level of security that should be provided to the specified category of data.
Privacy-Based Labeling
The second-most important labeling is the privacy-based labeling that defines privacy metadata against unstructured data for determining the purpose of processing, retention period, special data category, etc.
Final Thoughts
Unstructured data isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It exists and it will eventually grow more and become even more challenging. With advanced technologies and robotic automation, organizations can automate and streamline their unstructured and structured data discovery, classification, and cataloging to define their privacy use-case, establish security controls, and meet compliance.
