The quick answer is that unstructured data is any information that does not fit neatly into database rows or tables.
This includes information contained in documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photographs, and audio and video recordings. Unfortunately for organizations, unstructured data accounts for approximately 80% of all the information they maintain, and it is typically stored with little to no control on hard drives, file shares, removable devices, ad-hoc directories, and document repositories.
According to an article published by securityintelligence.com, ‘Cybercriminals are aware that critical unstructured data is a much easier target for theft than structured data that is protected by corporate firewalls, identity and access controls, encryption, database activity monitoring and more. Because organizations struggle to understand where that critical unstructured data is, how it is used, and who has access to it, it can represent a bigger risk to the enterprise.’
Unstructured data presents another risk because it is often ‘in-flight’. Unstructured data is in constant motion being shared with multiple individuals, in multiple departments, internally and externally making it vulnerable to being compromised intentionally or accidentally.
At Confidencial we enable zero-trust sharing of unstructured documents on a need-to-know basis inside and outside the organization. Unlike other solutions that require uploading and distributing secure documents from a proprietary cloud solution, Confidencial is integrated with your common desktop applications.
This integration allows you to secure information within those applications and retain native document format extensions such as .DOCX or .XLSX. This means you can store and distribute secure documents as you do today without any disruption to your normal workflow. Plus, Confidencial allows you to secure different parts of the document that are only accessible by the individuals you authorize. You no longer have to create multiple versions of the same document based on who is authorized to see what information.
To learn more about Confidencial, follow us on LinkedIn and visit us at www.confidencial.io to try it for free.