In a bid to assist organisations to classify data, a crucial part of any data management exercise, research house Gartner recently released its methodology for sorting the crucial from the trivial.

According to the report, it is well understood that risk is a function of asset value. "A hacked or crashed computer has no loss impact unless valuable data is accessed or mission-critical functionality is inaccessible. It is also well recognised that the amount of money spent on protective controls must be appropriate for the risk - it makes no sense to apply the highest levels of protection to every IT asset. Determining just what level of protection is necessary requires some understanding of the system's or data asset's importance, a process that often is referred to as 'classification'.