HP Autonomy has announced a new solution designed to address the cost, compliance and control challenges confronted by organisations struggling to manage increasing volumes of legacy information.

Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup, powered by Autonomy ControlPoint 4.0, helps organisations gain access to, understand, classify and defensibly dispose of outdated and unnecessary legacy information.

Many are dealing with information sprawl from multiple legacy systems, as well as information acquired as part of corporate mergers and acquisition activity. Legacy data in old SharePoint sites, email file stores and other repositories can quickly become hidden from the organization at large. 

This "dark data" eats up storage budgets and inhibits efforts to modernize infrastructure and migrate information to the cloud. Dark data also contains unknown business value and risk to an organization.

The Autonomy solution addresses these issues by allowing organisations to:

- Explore and analyse content from multiple data sources, such as email repositories, file shares and SharePoint sites, to identify, filter, classify and separate valuable from outdated information.

- Dispose of data that has "aged out" of organisations' retention policies-and establish an audit trail.

- Apply policy and take action on identified content by moving the data to an information archiving or records management system, for more efficient legal holds and improved access to information.

Together, these capabilities solve an important big data challenge for organizations of all sizes, resulting in reduced data storage costs, lower risks to the business, and greater control and leveragability of an organisation's distributed data assets.