Is Data Collection a Waste of Time and Resources?
More than one-third of collected data is considered useless, and if the trend of indiscriminately storing data continues, it will cost businesses $3.3 trillion.
52% of all information that organizations worldwide store and process is considered “dark.”
33% of data is known to be useless. If collection continues unabated, it will cost organizations $3.3 trillion to manage by 2020.
For the average midsized organization holding 1,000TB of data, the cost to store non-critical information is $650,000 annually.
Veritas’ previous study, the Data Genomics Index, found that more than 40% of stored data has not been touched in three years and is stale. This year’s report confirms that IT leaders know this.
The worst data offenders are Germany, Canada and Australia, having respectively 66%, 64% and 62% of stored dark data. In the U.S., 54% of data is unknown.
China has the highest proportion of “clean” data at 25%. Israel follows at 24%, Brazil at 22%. But 75% of all data they store is dark.
The race to the cloud is feeding data hoarding. These behaviors include:
IT strategies and budgets based solely on data volumes, not business value.
Rapid adoption of cloud applications and storage under a false “storage is free” premise.
Employees believe corporate IT resources are free both for business and personal use.
On average, 26.5% of employees store personal data on their work devices. IT cannot tell which has business value and which does not.