Veritas’ Report shows that only 15% of the stored data is classified as business critical information and data overload could cost organizations up to $3.3 Trillion cumulatively by 2020
Releasing the findings of its Global Databerg Report, a large global independent survey covering 2,550 senior IT decision makers across 22 countries, Veritas revealed that 52% of all information currently stored and processed by organizations around the world is considered ‘dark’ data, whose value is unknown. Additionally, another 33% of data is considered redundant, obsolete, or trivial. If left untamed, this dark and ROT business data will unnecessarily cost organizations around the world a cumulative $3.3 trillion to manage by 2020.
Organizations are creating and storing data at an ever-increasing rate due to a ‘data hoarding’ culture and an indifferent attitude to retention policy. This data could be anything from valuable business information to non-compliant information. The report reveals that IT leaders consider just 15% of all stored data to be classified as business critical information.
As per the press release, for the average mid-sized organization holding 1000TB of data, the cost to store their non-critical information is estimated at more than $650,000 annually. Providing insights from over 2500 IT professionals in 22 countries, the report follows the Data Genomics Index which gives an accurate view of the composition of enterprise data based on analysis of billions of files. The Data Genomics Index found that over 40% of stored data has not been touched in over 3 years, and is considered ‘stale.
“Understanding and acknowledging that a data hoarding culture exists is a first step in addressing the problem,” said Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer of Veritas. “More and more organizations are realizing it. The problem most face is they do not know what data to start with, what risk it may contain and where the value is discovered. Once they have visibility into that environment, they can make decisions faster, with more confidence, and bring in other business stakeholders to move forward with a well-conceived plan.”
The study, conducted for Veritas by research firm Vanson Bourne, looks at how organizations across the globe store and manage their data providing vital insights. It highlights attitudes and behaviors that are fueling an unprecedented data explosion. The survey showed that the vast majority of business data sits below the waterline. Country wise, the worst dark data offenders are Germany, Canada and Australia with respectively 66%, 64% and 62% of their stored data defined as dark, leaving the US in a mid-range position with 54% of their data being unknown. The highest proportion of clean and identified business critical data was found in China (25%), Israel (24%) and Brazil (22 %). The report also put forward the issue of personal data over organization networks. Over 25% of employees store personal data on work devices ranging from personal, legal and identification documents (57%), photos (57%), music (47%) down to video (33%) and games (26%). Many of these documents may trigger new data privacy rules in regional jurisdictions or potential copyright issues, the press release said.
Cloud adoption and processing is set to increase by more than a third during 2016 to 46% from 33%, with Brazil and USA leading with an average of 61% of data predicted to be in the cloud by the end of the year. Although the short term driver is to reduce cost, there is increasing concern over lock-in costs in the future – pushing data to the cloud can just move the problem further away, adding to the dark, and unclassified dark data.
