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Retaining redundant, obsolete or trivial data (ROT) raises costs and business risk. Data minimization is the answer, and can enable your team to achieve more.
In a world of cheap, effectively infinite cloud storage, it can feel like there is no need for the delete key. After all, we can keep everything forever, pay next to nothing per item, and never worry about it again, right? Well, no.
Data has costs that go beyond the infrastructure bill and retaining it forever risks impacting your organization in unexpected ways. The cost/benefit calculation isn’t as straightforward as you might think.
In this post, we will look at the hidden (or not so hidden) costs of retaining data, and how a focus on data minimization can not only reduce them but enable your team to achieve more with the data you do decide to keep. But first, let’s look at a taxonomy of ROT: the data we don’t wish to retain.
Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial data is a set of classifications for data that organizations don’t need but continue to retain. This data naturally accumulates over time in the course of normal business operations. Employees create ROT when they save multiple copies of the same information (Redundant data), retain out-of-date information (Obsolete data), or save irrelevant or personal information to their work devices or drives (Trivial data).
The argument for ‘keeping everything’ often revolves around the perception that data should be retained because, ‘we might need that one day’. The reality however is that keeping information too long can raise many types of risks to your business:
We often think of cost as a relatively simple $X per TB ratio. However, when calculating the true cost of storage, you also need to look at other dimensions, including:
While you may be paying $0.023 per TB of data, that number may pale in comparison to the direct and indirect costs above. Worse, this investment may be for content that you do not even need to keep and which, in its keeping, could cause your organization harm.
So, what do you do?
At the core of the solution is developing a better understanding of your data, separating the wheat from the chaff. Only once you do that can you appropriately minimize the amount of data you are keeping on an ongoing basis. You need to remove the ROT.
Now you understand the issues ROT can cause, you can begin the process of removing it. Below is a high-level guide to removing ROT so your organization can begin achieving its business objectives. Understand your data. What do you have across your data corpus? What formats, date ranges exist? Can you determine the purpose/process it was collected for?
Once you have the profile completed you will have a systematic set of rules against which you can analyze your various data shares and start to clean up your data corpus by disposing of data that is not required. This will save you storage space and budget, while making your team members’ lives easier. They won’t have to wade through pages of irrelevant and outdated search results, saving them valuable time and effort.
Remember, as we automate processes it is vital that the most accurate, up-to-date information is used within those processes. Having too much ROT can seriously hamper this goal, and cause harm, as decisions are made based on the incorrect information.
If you’re worried about the impact of ROT on your organization, but you lack the time and resources to conduct the review manually, RecordPoint could be the solution. As part of our commitment to high quality information governance outcomes we have developed File Analysis. File Analysis is a simple and efficient way to discover what's in your file share data, identify high value (and low value) data and give you the intelligence to understand what you can do with it next. Empowered by your customized File Analysis report, your organization can make cost saving, risk reducing and quality migration decisions about that data.
File Analysis ensures only the right information is retained, with ROT data clearly identified for easy deletion.
View our expanded range of available Connectors, including popular SaaS platforms, such as Salesforce, Workday, Zendesk, SAP, and many more.
Avoid risk, manage data more easily, and cut costs by removing unnecessary data with RecordPoint Data Minimization.
Protect your customers and your business with
the Data Trust Platform.