Data is an organization’s most valuable resource, but also comes with a cost, risk, and potential unintended negative consequences. Organizations are deploying BigID to tackle some of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts of data.

BigID provides automated and ML-driven capabilities that aligns data management with ESG initiatives.

Environmental

Organizations concerned about environmental impact want to reduce their carbon footprint. A 2022 MIT Press Reader Article says that, ‘The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.’

The carbon emissions from data centers exceed those of the airline industry.

In addition to being environmentally responsible and protecting brand image, there are business consequences to developing and enforcing environmentally responsible data practices. A growing number of consumers are becoming environmentally conscious and, given a choice, may choose to do business with companies that have similar values and goals to protect the environment.

BigID helps organizations reduce data center operating power by reducing data volume to require less storage. BigID identifies duplicate data to delete unnecessary copies of data and applies retention policies to identify and delete expired data. Reducing duplicate and obsolete data also helps decrease wasted cycles and computing energy used by data analysts searching for the data that they need.

Social

Data privacy is a concern for consumers— so much so that government regulations are increasing to protect citizens and residents from abuse of their personal data. BigID automated data intelligence discovers all data and tags personal or sensitive data for protection. Organizations use that classification and sensitive data tagging to assign policies that limit data access and exposure of personal or sensitive information. Brand value and company reputation will increase from responsible social data initiatives as customers want to do business with companies that they can trust with their personal data.

Social data is impactful in hiring practices. Organizations using automated tools like resume scanning to assist with screening candidates are concerned about ethical AI to reduce bias in hiring practices. Hiring teams using BigID to find similar datasets can add more data sources to their models. Increasing the breadth of data points for a wider sample, possibly from different sources, reduces the chance of bias.

Governance

Data governance practices align to company culture in the way that data is managed for ethical data access and sharing and applying consistent data rules, and transparency in reporting.

Data teams use BigID to proactively identify personal and sensitive information and monitor that the data is protected, only seen by roles with appropriate access, and used the right way. In a business where everyone wants to use data for all purposes, an organization that can proactively identify and monitor sensitive data use has an advantage for ESG initiatives.

BigID finds sensitive data in both structured and unstructured data and scans all sources including databases, data lakes, files, and emails. Finding and proactively protecting data makes organizations less exposed to risk and data mismanagement or corruption because sensitive data can be tracked through the organization and in files and emails to be responsible with how data is used.

ESG Summary

Overall, responsible data management is integrated into company culture and reflected in how the business operates. BigID data intelligence helps to align data practices with ESG initiatives for organizations that want to:

  • Reduce their data carbon footprint
  • Protect and manage information collected about customers and employees
  • Deploy ethical governance practices

Contact BigID for a demo to see how you can use automated discovery, classification, and policy management to increase ESG practices.