Information Governance 101

Information Governance is an approach to managing and applying a set of policies, processes, and infrastructure to information. These policies enable the organization to maximize business value, increase IT efficiency in managing data and information assets, and minimize risk.

Three Essential Steps to Kickstart Information Governance

1. Clarify

The first step in the information governance process is understanding the data and information you have. Understanding what you have helps you better understand what you need. Consider asking yourself helpful questions, such as:

• How often is it used?
• What kind of information is it
• How old is it? This information lifecycle is a dark mystery in most organizations.

Mercury analyzes your information to give you clarity on what information you have. This helps you create and implement an information governance strategy that works for your organization.

2. Clean

The next step in effective information governance is cleaning up your stored information. This includes removing data that provides no business value, is outdated, or otherwise inactive files. It’s also an important step in lifecycle management, as you can archive or delete documents beyond their retention period.

Mercury provides an automated system for identifying and releasing data that needs to be defensibly deleted. Not only is this an essential step, it also reduces your storage costs. In most cases, businesses see cost reductions from 60 – 80%.

3. Classify

Classifying documents has always been an essential task in records management. However, classifying documents manually typically covers only 30% of an organization’s information. This is thanks in part to the strenuous process of sorting through big data sets.

MercuryClassify, an essential module of Mercury, allows you to automatically classify documents based on content and keywords. Automated classification is the only way to fully automate information governance.

Mercury – The Backbone of Your Information Governance Strategy

Mercury, our easy-to-implement industrial automation software, allows you to manage your enterprise information regardless of where it resides. Structured and unstructured data get stored in different applications and silos. These include file shares, SharePoint, email, enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM systems, or in-house applications.

Mercury also reduces IT storage costs and compliance risk and maximizes information value. Our solutions allow you to automate critical information governance and storage optimization tasks.

Mercury ensures that your information governance program is consistently applied across different systems and content types so that you can:

1. Gain transparency into your records and information
2. Ensure that sensitive content such as PII or IP is identified and managed to increase data security
3. Delete valueless information or information that might cause harm to the organization if not identified correctly
4. Find information more readily during a discovery process
5. Ensure long-term audit-proof preservation of information
6. Enable an effective retention schedule, ensuring regulatory compliance
7. Ensure intelligent and cost-effective storage of information

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Auto-Classification for Information Governance

MercuryClassify is our Adaptive Auto-Classification technology. It classifies a wide range of structured and unstructured enterprise data. This includes e-mails, documents, files, records and ERP data, file servers, and SharePoint objects. It enables follow-on processes such as DLP, intelligent movement of information to optimized storage tiers, audit-proof archiving, and eDiscovery.

1. Greater degree of information transparency
2. Ensures compliance with internal policies and information security standards
3. Identify critical information that should not be moved to the cloud
4. Auto-encrypt sensitive information before moving it to the cloud
5. Identify important information that needs to be archived

Information Governance Solves Real Business Problems

Information and data governance offers solutions to everyday problems faced by your team. Letting automated tools manage information helps when:

1. Employees can‘t effectively collaborate or share knowledge
2. Compliance requirements don’t follow a fixed sequence or structure
3. Document transfers and chain of authorship become hard to track
4. Existing structures prevent flexibility
5. 40% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent managing documents
6. 15% – 35% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent searching for information
7. 15% of the work week is spent reproducing information that already exists