700 TB of data scanned, categorized, and quarantined to avoid sanctions and reputational loss

for one of the big four accounting firms and a Fortune 100 company

One of the Big Four accounting firms and a Fortune 100 company were sued by a client for mismanaging its audit and data exposure. After several failures and numerous inquiries, the government decided to impose fines based on British audit laws on the company. The accounting firm also faced high reputational risks besides the monetary penalty.

Business Need

  • Identifying data that belongs to the client spread across a vast data estate
  • Identifying sensitive data in the customer’s client files
  • Establishing a process to protect sensitive data and its remediation to enhance governance and compliance
  • Migrating the data to Azure for effective and strategic data management
  • Building a robust operating model for easy data discovery, classification, and security of its client data

Challenges Faced

  • Sued for more than 1 billion pounds in penalties for mishandling client data during audits
  • Data sprawl of 700TB of data residing on the production and DR storage cluster
  • Inability to identify the type of unstructured data as well as the risk posed by the data
  • Reputational risk

Solution Offered

To overcome the customer’s challenges, Data Dynamics collaborated with one of its leading partners (a multinational provider of IT infrastructure services) and implemented its unified data management platform to deliver the following capabilities:

  • Classification of data: 700 TB of data scanned and analyzed to categorize, tag, and index data specific to the customer’s client. Metadata analysis to identify the age profile of data held in the storage area per Create, Modified, and Last Accessed metadata.
  • Identification of sensitive data: Content analytics was used to analyze over 175 TB of data to identify sensitive information about customers
  • Quarantine and role-based access: Personal or business-sensitive information was quarantined to reduce exposure and risk of rogue data usage by isolating it into secure storage with limited access.
  • Migrate to Azure: The customer’s business objective was to move out of its UK data centers and migrate into Azure to achieve efficient and effective data management, reduce risk, ensure compliance, and enable unparalleled scale and compute power. The Data Dynamics’ platform helped the client break free from traditional lift-and-shifts, adopt a data-driven approach, and build a strong Cloud foundation to benefit from IT cost savings, productivity gains, business agility, and operational resilience.

Platform Architecture

Business Impact

Data Dynamics helped the customer:

  • Discover, classify, tag, and index data based on ownership, access, metadata, and content to:
    • Manage unstructured data patterns and structure it
    • Identify, remediate and quarantine sensitive data to quickly identify the accounting firm’s client data to offer optimal protection.
    • Enhance governance with data compliance reporting for internal and external compliance reporting 
    • Create an optimal data management lifecycle model to strengthen its case against future penalties and reputational damage
  • Migration to Azure helped the customer become Data Custodians of the future by structuring unstructured data and maximizing value through data-driven cloud adoption
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