Rio Tinto announced that it has entered into a global agreement with Active Navigation to triage and support the management of its unstructured digital data.

Scott Singer the Head of Global Business Services at Rio Tinto said: “We generate a huge volume of unstructured data and growth rates are expanding significantly.  Our early trials with Active Navigation identified that approximately 40% of our data was eligible for defensible destruction.  We are now incorporating Active Navigation software as a primary mechanism for file analysis and disposition.  We see a strong ongoing business case with this solution by lowering our storage costs while strengthening our overall information governance across Rio Tinto.”

“However like most large companies we are not good at ‘hitting the delete key’. We have to embrace the notion of defensible destruction, where data is deleted in a controlled, legally defensible and regulatory compliant way.  For the data we keep but don’t require every day, we must leverage low cost cloud solutions such as Amazon Web Services. Like most businesses we do not have the core expertise to manage this and that is why we have engaged Active Navigation to work with us on a global basis.”

Active Navigation’s File Analysis software will enable Rio Tinto to identify and action data that is to be kept on live networks, moved to low cost storage, or to be deleted.

Peter Baumann CEO of Active Navigation commented “After working with Rio Tinto already for more than three years we are really excited to be expanding our relationship through this ground breaking partnership. Rio Tinto have recognized that as they move more data into the Cloud, the most cost effective and efficient way to do that is to only keep and move what is required. Our proprietary software and managed services solution is ideal for this and sets the foundation for a future of strong Information Governance across Rio Tinto’s unstructured data worldwide”.

The Active Navigation solution is based around its integrated suite of tools supported by its proven methodology. It ensures complete integrity around the data that is to be kept, stored, or deleted. The software also enables the identification of sensitive data and the development of classification structures including metadata augmentation that can be used as part of a migration to content management applications such as Microsoft’s SharePoint.