Exploring what lies beneath SA's Databerg with Nick Christodoulou
We spoke to Nick Christodoulou, Country Manager South Africa at Veritas, about what contributes to South Africa's Databerg and what can be done about it.
What are the main factors contributing to the wild growth of the Databerg?
Nick Christodoulou: The survey identified three major causes for Databerg growth. These relate to how data volumes disproportionately affect IT strategy, how vendor hype is driving the widespread adoption of currently 'free' storage and how employees are endangering corporate data through their own actions and becoming data hoarders:
• IT strategies based on data volumes not business value
• An increased reliance in 'free' storage such as in the cloud
• A growing disregard for corporate data policies by employees
What is the biggest reason companies hold onto useless/old data?
Christodoulou: Because storage is being perceived as being very cheap, companies do not see a need to run intensive analytics on the data they have stored on a regular basis. At the same time, the amount of data is growing with tremendous pace. IDC and other analysts are predicting that the data volume stored by companies is doubling every two years. So there is no pressure to delete the data on one side and a data explosion on the other side that will definitively increase the pressure. We expect that companies will soon identify the huge part of business irrelevant data they are storing as an issue.
What is the best method of attack concerning data hoarders?
Christodoulou: We suggest following these approaches: identify your dark data and find out if it has a business value or if it is redundant, obsolete and trivial data. This has to be done regularly as new data is being stored every single day.
As a second step, we advise companies to implement a regular process to delete all the data that has no use from a regulatory, financial and business perspective. We call these types of data redundant, obsolete or trivial data (ROT). By deleting ROT on a regular basis, you use your valuable IT resources in an efficient way as the amount of business irrelevant data is kept on a very low level. Also, this task should be described in a policy and executed on a regular basis once a month or at least once a quarter.
As a third method, we suggest defining a workable information governance strategy for unstructured data with C-level endorsement to encourage compliant user behaviour. If you educate your users to not store trivial data on corporate devices, you will immediately reduce the growth in this area. This also has to be done regularly.
Are companies, or those in charge of relevant decision-making, sufficiently informed about their own Databerg, how much money it will waste and the benefits of maximising the utilisation of the data they have available? If they are, why haven't all of them employed strategies to address this issue?
Christodoulou: Actually, most of the companies do not have sufficient information about the data they have stored and, therefore, they are not aware of the costs. This is one of the key findings of the survey that companies still believe, storage is almost for free. In South Africa, 58% of the data is dark, the companies simply do not know what is in the data. It could be business critical or redundant or trivial data. But because it is dark, it moves corporate resources away from the direct line of sight of management teams. It can also, thanks to impending legislation, present legal issues and business risks, which are not obvious at the time of purchase or usage.
Can you elaborate on the 'storage is free' misconception and why this misconception has taken root?
Christodoulou: The 'free storage' myth is driven by the industry that is promoting concepts like 'get double the amount of storage for half the price'. The myth is seductive as it makes companies believe they have no need to worry where their data resides while they invest in more cheap storage or freely adopt cloud applications. It also supports organisations who simply keep storing data as default mode. But the pure storage costs are reflecting only a part of the real costs as you need to invest not only in hardware, but also in co-location, in people and energy to maintain the data stores.
And finally, you need to identify the data on a regular basis to fully understand the value and potential risks. Otherwise, you will have a huge portion of your Databerg under water that will create high risks for your business and slow you down.
