Why Does Document Metadata Matter?

When you think about the information contained in a business document, what stands out to you as the most important? Chances are, your mind just jumped to the words on the pages of that document. After all, that’s where your reader will find the message you’re trying to convey or the contract you’re asking them to sign.

But for security professionals like myself, the most critical information within any business content lives between the lines, in that document’s metadata. Metadata is a valuable asset in today’s digital HQ, although there’s a knowledge gap for average professionals with no security background.

Optimizing your organization’s upkeep of metadata requires a comprehensive understanding of the role it plays in the modern enterprise. Let’s explore why metadata matters, the risks poor metadata management poses,  and what your business can do to better support it.

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The key to document governance

Metadata is a critical part of an organization’s document governance strategy. With the proper structure in place, it can minimize risk by ensuring business content is compliant with company protocols and external security regulations. Metadata also provides the information your IT and security teams need to locate, collate, and secure such documents later on.

Every organization uses metadata, whether it’s basic document properties or more sophisticated XMLs, and the bigger the organization, the bigger its metadata requirements. To put this into context, Templafy recently surveyed over 2,000 full-time employees working across the globe to determine the role content plays in the modern enterprise. We found that 60% of respondents estimated each member of their team is responsible for upwards of ten pieces of content per week. To extrapolate a bit, every respondent worked at a company with 1,000+ employees – that means these organizations are creating at least 10,000 documents per week. That’s a lot of content to govern!

Enterprises like these must control which documents are going out, at what time, and to whom. This requires structure within each and every document to ensure sensitive information doesn’t end up in the wrong hands and content can be easily located within the organization.

Metadata creates the necessary structure for employees to find and control the documents they need, similar to how a librarian may shelve a certain book based on topic, author, or year so they can easily find it later. Metadata digitally serves the same purpose and allows for a broader scope of data employees can use for categorization.

Without metadata, it would be virtually impossible to locate the documents you need, when you need them. By assigning easily-locatable values like case ID, classification, or keywords, metadata allows employees to instantly surface the right document or file.

A common language for enterprise IT infrastructure

Templafy’s Content Is Everything report found that 77% of respondents said they have more tools available than ever before to create and house content. What does that actually look like? In the US, for example, nearly a third (30%) of employees said they use more than eight different tech applications to create and compile different varieties of business content.

The metadata within documents is what allows these disparate systems to talk to each other and work together. If a piece of content is passed from a document generation solution to a spell check application, its metadata enables each system to gain the necessary context about that document to treat it accordingly.

Through this vital information the application can learn what the document is about, who created it, who it should and shouldn’t be sent to, etc. This in turn enables more productive and efficient workflows and the seamless sharing of information across enterprise systems.

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The meta risk of metadata

All enterprise security hinges on metadata. It points employees towards determining document sensitivity and the actions attached to that classification level, and it instructs your enterprise systems to either block, encrypt, or send documents on to recipients. Metadata is thereby critical for data loss prevention systems like Azure Information Protection (AIP).

The metadata risk for modern enterprises is two pronged. First, there is a stunning lack of education around metadata and its role: 46% of respondents in leadership roles admitted they lack comprehensive knowledge of what metadata is or why it is important to business document management and creation. Second, the majority of current systems do not automatically generate the metadata they need, relying instead on individual employees to input this information.

Coupled with an insufficient understanding of metadata’s significance, tedious, manual processes like these can have a snowball effect and lead to a lack of enterprise control over proprietary documents. Over a third (36%) of Content Is Everything respondents argued their company urgently needs a better system to support mandatory document sensitivity classification. Individual employees have enough on their plates without the added burden of manual document governance.

Metadata tools, tricks, and tips

To better support metadata, businesses must invest in tools that automatically generate the information needed based on gating questions, user profiles, and where content creators are located. By ensuring the right foundations are in place to allow a company’s systems and processes to work together, enterprises can simplify and streamline employee workflows while simultaneously strengthening their overall content infrastructure.

Finally, to account for the employee knowledge gap when it comes to metadata, security leaders like CISOs should implement organization-wide training on topics like infosec and cybersecurity. Pairing these trainings with a quiz or Q&A for employees to take on a regular basis will make matters of security, compliance and risk as they pertain to metadata an ongoing conversation instead of one-off onboarding sessions.

In the digital HQ, the vast majority of business is conducted online, employees are scattered across the globe due to remote work, and there’s an overwhelming amount of tools available to help us do our jobs. It’s imperative that enterprises treat seemingly minute assets like metadata with the same caution and care as other matters of cybersecurity if they want to succeed and thrive in a digital environment.