Stop the ROT!

The result is what we at Veritas identified in a recent report as the Databerg: a great, lumbering mass comprised of 54% unstructured dark data and 32% useless data lurking beneath the waves, with barely 17% identified, business-critical data poking above the waterline. We describe the useless data as ROT – Redundant, or duplicate, data; Obsolete, no longer having business value; and Trivial with little or no business value. Our study estimates that, left unchecked, ROT data alone could equate to almost ?600bn of avoidable storage and management cost by 2020 in EMEA firms. It costs the average midsize company with 1000TB of data around ?435k annually.

This is rarely seen as a single figure as it sits across all cost centres and is hidden in Capex and Opex. But if it were a single line item on the CFO’s report, answers would certainly be called for, not only on the financial waste it represents but also on its potentially dangerous occupation of essential storage burst headroom. And there is additionally the environmental and further cost impact of powering of this wasted storage to consider.

No one could have predicted the sheer scale of the explosion in data ­in recent years, and IDC expects that the digital universe will reach an inconceivable 44 zettabytes by 2020 as more and more devices and people become connected. This is placing an enormous amount of pressure on IT leaders, whose budgets have remained static at best ­– in most cases, CIOs are doing a good job to simply keep the lights on. Sold on the myth that storage is cheap, they’re adding bolt-on capacity with little thought given to the costs involved in managing these vast acres of information. The ‘free storage’ myth is seductive. It makes businesses believe they have no need to worry where their data resides as they freely adopt cloud applications and storage.

With GDPR and the next phase for safe habour looming on the horizon, European businesses can ill-afford to hoard useless, and potentially non-compliant, data. We’re calling on technology leaders to gain visibility, take action and assume control of the Databerg in 2016.

We need to minimise ROT data by securely deleting it on a regular basis. And we need to use the right technology to shine a light on dark data to weed out compliance risks which could have a devastating impact on brand reputation, whilst capturing the business-critical information which could have hidden value. Valuable data can be transformed into valuable information, valuable insights and, ultimately, competitive advantage. ROT data, meanwhile, is only a cost burden resting on the shoulders of UK businesses. 2016 should be the year that CIOs Stop the ROT.