If you’re like most people, you spend far too much time repeating manual tasks. Tasks like saving email attachments, tagging files and writing simple emails are probably not the best use of your talent and energy. Multiply all that work by the number of people in your organization, and you get a clear, if alarming, picture of how much time is wasted on non-essential tasks.

With all the email, documents, Slack messages, and other artifacts that come through my purview each day, I think the language gods will forgive me for a few typos. But I would hate to think that a keystroke error could result in an irrecoverable breach of my company’s most private data. Seems a bit dramatic, no? According to a recent Forbes article, Dropbox users face this very issue when sharing sensitive data.

An unsecured AWS S3 bucket with 5.5 million business files was recently discovered by security researchers at vpnMentor. All of these files were publicly available without any password protection or other security protocols attached to them. This kind of thing happens regularly with cloud service providers, and it often occurs when IT teams neglect to set security and compliance rules within their cloud environments.

I sometimes wish someone with gravitas had said, “There is no content without security.” That would have looked good coming from Churchill or Lincoln. But their lack of foresight about content services doesn’t diminish a very important fact, one that carries its own brand of import: the importance of security and governance for a company’s critical data.

Sprawl happens when anyone and everyone can create a site or team, usually without oversight, planning, or any kind of formal training, resulting in dozens/hundreds of rarely used or abandoned sites and teams, a poorly-performing search experience, and your intellectual property (content and conversations) spread across multiple locations each with a maze of chats, files, and channels.

Last year, Capital One showed the world why data governance is so important when it was the victim of a massive data breach that exposed the personal data of 106 million customers. It is still one of the biggest hacks ever recorded, and the company has now been fined $80 million by banking regulators. A “what’s in your wallet” meme would work great here, but let’s keep this classy.

Chaos is never good for business, but the reality is that it’s the state in which many companies live on a daily basis. The global pandemic shut down offices and dispersed workforces to employees’ homes and other socially-distanced locations. Without data governance plans to support remote workers, employees scavenged for, and used, tools and processes that helped them get their jobs done, often with little regard for long-time implications or risk to the company.

In the early days of SharePoint, installing a free version was fairly straight-forward and simple, and once in place, it would quickly catch on and spread across a single team, then expand between teams, and soon could be seen throughout the entire organization. In those early waves of growth, few paid much attention to the growing sprawl of sites and content.