Why is it important for a company to manage its metadata?

Posted by Harsharn Makkar

A company must manage its metadata due to the risks associated with unintended disclosures. Many programs create data (invisible to the untrained eye) about data, which becomes a part of the visible text of the document in a single file. This unseen information if transferred to a recipient along with the document can have dire consequences for the company. For example, most documents reveal the author, creation dates and other similar information.

General information about the sender may be harmless under most circumstances. However, other information such as comments added to a document during editing stages by the company executive and/or lawyer may haunt the company if those comments reveal confidential information and/or a formula or a trial and/or negotiation strategy.

In addition, if employees are not educated about metadata, they may inadvertently post a document on the web that contains damaging information. For example, consider the consequences on your bottom-line if competitors gained information about your profit margins or manufacturing data from the workbook file posted on your website because an employee did not realize that a feature like fast save simply appends the changes at the end of the document rather than replace it with actual edited material. Lastly, metadata matters because sensitive data that becomes part of a given file may be stored off of company servers in various places as well as formats around the world without company’s knowledge or even capabilities to track it.