The visibility gap.
Most data estate audits are a six-week consulting project that ends in a stratified opinion. Drop in Lightning IQ instead. Connect it to your hybrid storage in hours, index at one petabyte an hour, and watch the findings arrive while the traditional audit would still be writing the scoping document.
You do not have a data problem. You have a visibility problem.
Every governance, security, ESG and migration decision your team makes is downstream of one question: what is actually in our estate? Most organisations answer that question by asking the people who built the systems to remember.
The answer is usually optimistic, partial, and three years out of date. Lightning IQ replaces the memory exercise with a measurement.
1 petabyte per hour. Across NFS, SMB, S3, Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage. The first findings land before the kick-off deck has been finalised.
Sample-based audits cover 3% to 10% of an estate and project the rest. Lightning IQ covers all of it.
Findings as fact, not findings as opinion.
An audit you run, not the one you commission.
From estimate to measurement.
Drop in Lightning IQ. Connect it to your hybrid estate. Run a defined scan: PII, retention drift, ROT, dark data, the lot. Use the findings as the anchor for everything that comes next, governance, migration, ESG reporting, breach response. Move on if you want to. In practice, most clients keep it.
See the whole estate, fast.
Index hybrid storage at one petabyte per hour. First findings arrive while a traditional audit is still scoping the engagement.
Surface what was always invisible.
PII concentrations, duplicate sprawl, retention-overrun records, abandoned shares. Things teams have been speculating about for years, suddenly quantified.
Anchor every next decision.
Migration planning, governance prioritisation, breach response, ESG reporting. Each one starts from a measured baseline rather than a survey response.
What you actually scan for.
PII concentration scan
Find every cluster of unstructured personal data across the estate. Prioritise the densest, oldest, most exposed locations for remediation. Hand the heatmap to the DPO, not the consultancy.
GDPR 7-year retention sweep
Identify all personal data older than your published retention permits. Quantify exposure under Article 5(1)(e). Evidence the disposal that follows.
Pre-migration audit
Inventory everything before cutover. Decide what moves, what archives, what disposes. Migrate a clean estate, not a legacy estate with a new address. The cheapest terabyte to migrate is the one you delete first.
Acquisition due diligence
Index an acquired estate before you fully inherit it. Know what you are buying in data terms before you have bought it. Surface the liabilities the seller could not, or did not, disclose.
Get a measurement, not an estimate.
Model the time and cost of a sample-based consulting audit against a Lightning IQ scan of your actual estate. Sixty seconds, no email required.
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