So says international research firm IDC in its white paper “The High Cost of Not Finding Information” by analysts Susan Feldman and Chris Sherman.

The paper, summarized here, lists many consequences of inability to access data, including poor decision making, a duplication of efforts, lost revenue if customers can’t find information they need, and reduced productivity if workers can’t.

IDC then goes on to estimate that a “knowledge worker” (remember that term?) spends “about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30 percent of the workday, searching for information.” Let’s call it files, since that’s what the real crux is.

That’s…

I mentioned in a previous blog that the struggle of working with files today (and #thestruggleisreal) is not that we’re dealing with more files than ever before. Some people felt I was wrong, because their drives and online folders keep growing and growing along with their workload.

Fair point, so hear me out. Yes, overall, data loads are growing, but that is primarily because of cold files. The hot, important files that you need to do your job — your active files — are not responsible for this growth. Here’s what I mean.

This week you are assigned project A…

This morning we officially announced our upcoming enterprise file search product, DirectSearch, which will change the way you work with files, and even change the way you work with other humans.

DirectSearch solves several problems. The files you need, day in and day out, are scattered on your own computer, on a server somewhere, on a cloud somewhere, in online folders like Dropbox or Google Drive, and on other platforms like Slack, ShareFile, and Salesforce. Managing these separate silos is time consuming and migraine inducing.

Joe in marketing desperately needs the graphics that Ellen in engineering shared with you last…

Below is a post about how Cloudtenna uses machine learning, natural language processing, and an understanding on who is using which files to deliever a far more effective file search than traditional desktop search.

It is a mess to manage files.
(1) We are creating more content than ever.
(2) That content is lost, scattered across more apps than ever.

Employees spend upwards of 20% of their time searching for or recreating documents that already exist (IDC). It is crazy to think that one full day a week of productivity is lost because people don’t know where their files are…

In a recent post, we discussed Cloudtenna’s new approach to Identity Management (IDM). But now that you have an identity, what happens next?

Identity management opens the door to the many file repositories a user accesses every day. Files are scattered across these disparate data silos, and it has become virtually impossible to keep track the mess created. Cloudtenna catalogs this file activity — we call this the data graph.

The data graph is the foundation for the intelligent search, audit, and governance functions offered by Cloudtenna. Cloudtenna performs real-time data modeling on this data set to return (1) insights…

How many apps do you use in a given day? Between Slack, Dropbox, and Salesforce, I’m constantly bouncing back and forth throughout my day. Realistically, employees now use dozens of apps. Naturally, enterprises struggle to keep track of files that have become scattered across many on-prem and cloud services.

Cloudtenna catalogs file activity across disparate data silos and provides A.I. services to help companies mitigate the chaos. This helps companies search and audit files that are scattered across many on-prem and cloud data silos.

Enterprise search, auditing, and governance are nothing new. These tools, though, need to be reimagined for…

[NOTE: This was first published on LinkedIn]

For all Jon Snow’s heroism, for all of Tyrian Lannister’s cunning, HBO could not prevent the latest in the ongoing series of high-profile data breaches (Littlefinger? Ramsey Bolton? He is, after all, a pirate.) Such breaches have plagued organizations from the federal government to retail, not to mention the most obvious antecedent in this case, when winter came to Sony, resulting in at least $35 million in losses related to investigations, IT repairs, and future prevention, as well as the recent Netflix hack. Indeed, this isn’t even a first for HBO.

And while…

[NOTE: Originally published on LinkedIn] In 1990, Steve Jobs made a now famous analogy, suggesting he sees the computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” He noted a study he read that demonstrated that humans are not optimized for locomotion, expending more energy than a condor to travel the same distance. When a journalist then compared a human on a bicycle to all the other animals listed in the study, however, the results were different.

“A human riding a bicycle blew away the condor all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big…