Case Study: Plains Midstream Canada achieves 50% data reduction and multimillion-dollar savings with ActiveNav

How Plains Midstream Canada Manages 80 Million Files of Unstructured Data

Plains Midstream Canada, a 1,000+ employee oil & gas company in Alberta, faced a massive compliance and information-management challenge after acquisitions left them with huge volumes of unstructured data (title cites 80 million files and several terabytes). They needed to protect sensitive data, meet strict government audit requirements, and deal with widespread ROT and hard-to-manage zip archives. To address this, Plains Midstream Canada turned to ActiveNav and its data-mapping and discovery platform.

ActiveNav unpacked and analyzed archives (one network revealed 15,000 zip files that expanded to 872,000 files), then classified and deduplicated content so only just over 400,000 records needed to be retained — remediating ~400,000 records and removing roughly 48–52% ROT across the environment. Using ActiveNav’s maps and metadata tooling, Plains migrated data to 50,000+ equipment records, gained full audit trails, cut daily backup and storage costs, achieved labor savings equivalent to many years of human effort, and realized cost savings worth millions per year while staying ahead of schedule and under budget.

Plains Midstream Canada

Erin Delorme

Information Management Specialist