Reflecting on 2025:
The Chronic Condition of Unstructured Data.

As I reflect on 2025, Lightning IQ has opened up some very different discussions for me.

For years, I have talked about data in the context of the "Hair on Fire" - Cyber Incidents, eDiscovery, Forensics, Government Investigations. The 'oh blimey, come quick please!' calls.

But this year, my focus has pivoted to the chronic condition of Unstructured Data in Datacentres.

My goodness, that is a can of worms...

For a start, it is remarkably unclear who is actually responsible for it. It’s a fascinating corporate hug of pointing and counter-pointing:

• Legal asks: "What does it say, are we liable, does it contain copyrighted material?"
• Compliance asks: "Is it risky?"
• ESG asks: "What's the CO2 output?"
• AI Teams ask: "Can we train on it?"
• And everyone points to IT.

Yet IT seems to have a blind spot. They keep the lights on, but they rarely know exactly what they have, where it is, what it says, and most critically, how much they actually hold.

How can you apply assurance to regulatory matters when you stumble on the very first question: "How much data do we actually have, what risk does it pose?"

It’s crazy to think that the only people who truly know are Finance because they're the ones paying for the storage be it on prem or hosted.

To that end, I have created some Calculators to shed a bit of light on these issues. From CO2 to ROT, from Tech Debt to AI Readiness... There are 10 tools all waiting for that one critical opening question.

How much data do you actually have?

The calculators can show, once you know how much data you have, critically, how much can you save?

Nick Pollard is Managing Director (EMEA) for Harmony House Technology. He is a seasoned leader with more than 20 years of experience working in real-time investigation, legal and compliance workflows across highly regulated environments.

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