Rio Tinto enters into digital data agreement

Rio Tinto has signed an agreement with Active Navigation for big data management and cloud services.

The agreement will see Active Navigation provide triage and support for management of Rio’s unstructured digital data.

The software and file analysis services will enable Rio TInto to identify and ‘action’ data that is to be kept on live networks, move to low cost storage, or deleated.

Scott Singer, Rio’s global business services head 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 per cent 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.”

He went on say that “like most 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 don 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 CEO Peter Baumann added that “Rio Tinto have recognised that as they move more data into the cloud, the most effective and efficient way to do that is to only keep and move what is required; our 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.