Simplifying data governance and migration for one of the UK’s largest pension providers.
NOW: Pensions was rethinking its company-wide approach to data – prioritising discoverability, governance, and multiple regulatory responsibilities. With over a terabyte of documents to migrate, all needing up-to-date assessment of their data classification, the company needed a solution that was quick, compliant, and aided data discovery – all while migrating to a new shared Cloud drive.
Having recently brought in Microsoft 365, the company wanted to leverage Microsoft’s online document management tool, SharePoint, and migrate their documents to this expansive Cloud file storage solution.
With NOW: Pensions operating under new data policies for internal and external regulations, and facing the challenge of moving vast amounts of data into their new SharePoint locations, they needed a solution that would simplify the data migration process, while satisfying the strict requirements of their new data policies.
- Discovery. NOW: Pensions needed to identify sensitive information contained within millions of documents, quickly and thoroughly. The Aiimi Insight Engine’s data discovery tools identified all documents within the shared drive that contained sensitive information, classifying and storing them automatically based on NOW: Pensions’ own criteria.
- Cloud Migration. The Aiimi Insight Engine’s Intelligent Data Migration software enriched NOW: Pensions’ structured and unstructured data, linked content from across the company’s legacy data storage, and removed any duplicate or irrelevant data before migrating NOW: Pensions’ shared drive content into the new Microsoft 365 SharePoint.
- Training. Aiimi’s data experts delivered training to over 150 NOW: Pensions employees, ensuring they were able use the Microsoft 365 environment, leveraging OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and all accompanying applications. This also included bespoke data governance training, to ensure all processes are followed according to NOW: Pensions’ own retention and compliance policies.
Using the Aiimi Insight Engine, NOW: Pensions have achieved greater visibility and management of their data, while ensuring that their new data governance policies are applied consistently.
Compliance, with data enriched by intelligent AI-powered technology that applies access policies and satisfies the requirements of the ICO and the Pensions Regulator, including GDPR. Using the Aiimi Insight Engine, NOW: Pensions was able to identify over 3 million spreadsheets that needed classifying under their new internal and external data policies, with the appropriate sensitivity labels and storage applied.
Cost, with legacy drives decommissioned, maintenance costs lowered, and resources freed up for internal IT. Now that surplus documents have been removed and the remainder housed within the company SharePoint, NOW: Pensions has been able to decommission its legacy in-house drives, saving on maintenance costs, freeing up data storage, and providing more operational bandwidth for their IT team.
Efficiency, with redundant documents removed and clear data structures within SharePoint that make it easier for employees to find the files they need. More than 1TB of data has been successfully migrated over to the new SharePoint solution, and 4 million documents that were no longer within the acceptable retention policy have been identified and deleted. More than 150 employees have since been trained in Microsoft 365, broadening their skillset, introducing them to their improved new data storage solution, and aligning them with NOW: Pensions’ data governance policies.
With Aiimi, I've added three key areas of business value: compliance, cost, and efficiencies. We spent a lot of time, effort, and money maintaining our Shared Drive that we can now eradicate.