Under the agreement, Active Navigation will provide software to enable Rio Tinto to identify and action which data is to be kept on live networks, moved to low cost storage or deleted through a triage system.

Rio Tinto head of global business services Scott Singer said the implementation of software would generate savings for the company.

“We get a huge amount of unstructured data and growth rates are expanding significantly,” he said.

“Our early trials with Active Navigation identified that approximately 40% of our data was eligible for defensible destruction.

“We are now incorporating Active Navigation software as a primary mechanism for file analysis and disposition.

“We see a strong ongoing business case with this solution by lowering our storage costs while strengthening our overall information governance across Rio Tinto.”

Singer said the agreement would allow Rio to dispose of its data in a safe and manageable way.

“Like most companies we are not good at ‘hitting the delete key’,” he said.

“We have to embrace the notion of defensible destruction, where data is deleted in a controlled, legally defensible and regulatory compliant way.”

Singer said the company would look to low cost cloud storage solutions for data used infrequently.