Editorial
The Gist
- Organizations build up a hidden digital estate over time. Myriad sites are set up by different parts of an organization but never retired, building up a large, sprawling digital footprint.
- Digital marketing teams lack awareness of it. Central digital teams are often unaware of the full extent and composition of this footprint.
- It represents a significant risk. Extensive collections of orphaned sites represent a security, compliance and reputational risk.
- You need to bring your digital estate under control. Brands need to take an asset management approach: AI can help identify what’s out there so teams can then work to reduce the risk.
Most digital marketing teams are all over their corporate website and other major digital channels and properties to make sure they are on-brand, optimized, secure and compliant. And while there are various degrees of success – compliance is often half-baked in areas such as accessibility – there is at least at a team actively managing the site, and making critical changes where necessary.
So far, so good. But often these major sites represent only a certain proportion of an organization’s entire digital footprint. There can be a surprisingly large number of sites or properties that remain live and accessible but are often long forgotten, an entire “hidden” digital footprint that the digital team and senior leadership may be completely unaware or only semi-aware of.
For example, the digital footprint of a complex global company could consist of a myriad of disconnected sites and orphaned pages. Event sites, newsletters, country-level operating sites, e-learning portals, one-off campaign sites, recruitment boards, syndicated content, customer support portals, departmental initiatives, collaboration portals and more; many of which may actually be redundant and long expired.
Collectively this digital estate presents a significant compliance and security risk that needs to be addressed. However, despite this problem being remarkably prevalent, few organizations are actively addressing this issue.
Table of Contents
- How a Hidden Digital Footprint Builds Up Over Time
- The Extent of the Hidden Digital Estate
- Getting the Hidden Digital Footprint Under Control
- Take Your Hidden Digital Footprint Seriously
How a Hidden Digital Footprint Builds Up Over Time
One of the main reasons that this “hidden” digital estate builds up over time is that is often done without the knowledge of the central digital team. Different pages, sites and content are set up by different locations, departments and divisions without ever having any central oversight or approval, usually because there is no requisite process in place. And after a digital property gets set up, it is then never actually retired.
For example, a business team employs an agency to set up a site for a campaign, but it is kept up as it still has some value. The recruitment team have a branded jobs board and then switch to another, but actually never closed the old one down. The team in one country have a whole series of additional web properties because sales operate in a slightly different way there. A division-level marketing team sets up a new online “flip book” of a key report and it got initial good traction, so it is kept online indefinitely.
Over years this estate of orphaned sites, zombie content, forgotten pages and digital detritus can build up and expand. Along the way it might grow exponentially as an organization acquires another and also inherits its existing digital hidden footprint.
Practical issues also exacerbate the situation:
- During COVID organizations had to create a multitude of sites very quickly for expediency, which were then potentially replaced with more permanent and sustainable channels.
- Employee turnover can also be high, so when a person leaves a business, the additional sites they commissioned simply get forgotten. For example, there may be staff who have contracted an agency directly to circumvent procurement processes and have now gone — the result is lost sites, lost content and limited records.
- Project contractors similarly may have contracted a preferred agency again outside the central procurement process and have now moved on.
- Content may be added to platforms manged by third parties that makes it difficult to control and less easy or obvious to retire.
Related Article: Digital Accessibility Drives Customer Loyalty and Inclusion
The Extent of the Hidden Digital Estate
Most teams think that their digital footprint is limited to a handful of sites and dramatically underestimate the number of sites or properties that can exist within a hidden digital footprint.
A couple of years back my team conducted some internal research to ascertain the extent of the hidden estate. Overall, we found that brands had significantly higher proportions of number of sites or digital properties than they thought they had. Even in regulated industries where arguably there is more rigour applied to the control of the digital estate, we found between 28% and 41% of the digital estate in terms of the number of digital properties was unknown to the web team. Some of the numbers in public sector organizations and higher education institutions were even higher.
These scenarios were typical of the organizations we looked at:
One online retailer mainly operating in the US and Western Europe had at least 50 sites on top of its main website — country-level sites, seven recruitment sites or pages, separate sites run by third parties relating to returning goods, local service sites with chat, multiple “offer” pages (some on third-party sites) and more.
Likewise, a large global engineering company counted nearly 300 sites in its known managed estate, but we found nearly an additional thousand separate digital properties, again covering localised sites across multiple countries, recruitment, events on third-party sites, chat or support sites, five external-facing learning management systems and many more.
What Is the Level of Risk?
Collectively, this hidden digital footprint represents a significant, ongoing risk. The level of risk is amplified because the central digital team do not have awareness. oversight or full control over these sites, so they cannot act to prevent issues from happening.
| Risk Area | Details |
|---|---|
| AI might pick up orphaned content | While search will occasionally pick up out-of-date content that you don’t want people to see, AI has the potential to reference it when giving responses to user prompts or even in generating new content. AI can spotlight outdated content and generate messaging which might be erroneous and damaging to your brand. |
| Brand compliance | Older content will almost certainly undermine your brand alignment, from expired logos through to content which his now very much off-message. |
| Cybersecurity | One of the most serious risks relates to cybersecurity. The older a site, the more likely it may have security issues. Hacking or the placement of malware is also far more likely to happen on a site that is not managed. |
| Data privacy and data breaches | Does a defunct event site store registration details of customers? Or the details of people who signed up for the campaign newsletter? Or even more seriously old payment details? A data breach is still a data breach. There is also the potential for insurance issues here – it is possible you may not be covered if you cannot prove what is within your digital landscape. |
| Regulatory compliance | There is the potential for a range of regulatory and compliance issues where the risk is heightened with older sites and content, such as content not being accessible to people with disabilities. Within regulated industries some content also needs to be tightly controlled – for example in the pharmaceutical sector any content relating to drugs and which markets it can be used has to be accurate, but there are consequences if the situation changes and digital content does not reflect this. There can even be more left field regulatory changes. For example, one financial services company had a number of existing campaign and event pages with unique contact numbers to track each event. However, they were caught out when a regulatory change meant that charging for calls was banned if the users were not told in advance. This left them legally exposed as well as having a reputation for taking money. |
Getting the Hidden Digital Footprint Under Control
In my view it is imperative for brands to get their full digital estate under control and reduce the risk, but in most organizations, there are multiple barriers:
- Digital teams aren’t fully aware of the issue.
- There is no central register of digital properties.
- There is no clear senior ownership for the problem.
- The sheer extent of the digital footprint means it is hard to tackle.
- The footprint keeps on growing and won’t be stopping anytime soon.
Related Article: Why Digital Accessibility Must Be Treated as a Risk Management Priority
Here’s what brands need to do to reduce the risk:
1. Take an Asset Management Approach
IT teams and Real Estate functions must actively manage their technology and property assets. Many digital marketing teams actively manage their digital brand assets in terms of images, videos and files. It’s time to take a similar asset management approach to online digital properties and create a central register of sites going forward.
2. Establish C-Suite Level Ownership
The issue of the hidden digital estate is unlikely to be taken seriously until there is clear senior management ownership and therefore accountability for reducing the associated risk. Here, it is possible that the CIO will be best fit if they are in a position to report to the board and on any subsequent progress made.
3. Leverage AI to Establish What’s Out There
AI can really play a valuable role in searching for and analysing the risk associated with the hidden digital estate, so you can get a picture of what is out there and what represents the most significant risk. And this is not a futuristic capability for tomorrow – the AI is here today to achieve this.
4. Act to Reduce the Most Significant Risks
It’s time to take action on the most significant risks and shut down that data-breach-waiting-to-happen. Realistically, there may be some challenges with particular sites where the ownership or who to contact is less than clear.
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5. Put in Governance to Prevent Proliferation
You’ll need to put in some form of governance to ensure any new site created is added to the central register of digital properties, potentially with some kind of approval workflow. This is easier said than done and it may require some change management – and blind faith – for different business functions to fall into line. Any governance should also take into account the digital sprawl of any acquired business.
6. Keep on Using AI to Keep the Hidden Footprint Back Under Control
Don’t stop now. Keep on using AI agents to identify new sites out there, to assess the risk when there are new regulatory changes or tweaks to your brand, and to identify the next tier of sites to eliminate.
Take Your Hidden Digital Footprint Seriously
The sprawl of orphaned sites and zombie content needs to be taken seriously. AI has a role to play and makes it possible — for the first time — to start to get this under control. It’s the right time to act.
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