Published on the 17/02/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
An exploration of the data files kept by 100 global companies has revealed that two in five data files hasn’t been used in three years, and 12 per cent has lain fallow for seven…
The inaugural Veritas Data Genomics Index is the result of analysing how billions of files stored by around 100 companies had been used over the last several years. The survey revealed that data growth was rising 39 per cent year on year – but not all that data can expect a long lifetime.
Chris Talbott, senior product marketing manager for Veritas, who is based in San Francisco, told iStart that he had expected the majority of files would be word files, or presentations, spreadsheets or video and audio. In fact around 20 per cent of the files stored were developer files, and there were also “Lots of compressed and unknown files.”
“In terms of modification, 41 per cent had not been modified in three years but companies are storing, maintaining and paying money for stale data,” he said.
Veritas triangulated its findings with Gartner’s cost of storage analysis and claims that US enterprises may be wasting as much as $US5 million per petabyte of data which is being stored but not used. He acknowledged that the figure would be lower in other geographies – $US3 million per petabyte in the UK for example – but was not aware of the financial impact on Australian and New Zealand companies.
Whatever the financial impact on individual entities, no one wants to pay for something they’re not using.
Stripping out the costs associated with stale data is something that can’t be handled manually according to Talbott. He said that on average there were 2.3 billion items in each petabyte of storage – going through that number manually to remediate the situation was not possible.
However he said most enterprises could clean up their data by eliminating “orphan data”, generated by people who no longer worked for the company, and then paying particular attention to video and audio files, along with Office related files, which Veritas’ analysis found to be over represented in the “stale data” category.
The company claimed that an organisation with 10 petabytes of data under management, which set up an archive project to focus on ridding itself of stale presentations, documents, spreadsheets and text files, could shave as much as US$2 million from its storage costs.
