When size really does matter…
Business data volumes are growing at an unparalleled rate. A 2022 survey of IT and data professionals in North America reported an average 63% increase per month, and one in ten survey respondents said that data volumes were growing at 100% per month in their organisation.
So it’s likely that you are rapidly amassing data in your organisation, but is it necessarily a problem?
Here are three reasons why the size of your data asset estate matters:
It is costing you money
It is putting you at risk of non-compliance
It is slowing you down.
Let’s look at each of these in more detail:
Spiralling costs
The more data you have, the more money it costs to store it in the cloud or in data centres. And it looks like unprecedented data growth is taking its toll on IT budgets, with a study from Wanclouds reporting that 81% of IT leaders have been directed by their C-suite to reduce or halt cloud spending.
And if you’re using data centres, the impact of your data isn’t just financial. Environmental concerns are now being raised due to the amount of energy required to power these facilities.
Is all your data compliant?
One of the main issues that we come across is the increase in ‘dark data’; a term applied to information that is essentially ‘undiscoverable’; no one knows it’s there, so it can’t be found. And as data growth rockets, some estimates suggest that dark data now makes up 90% of an organisation's total data asset estate.
This can potentially lead to non-compliance of data protection regulations, such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The GDPR contains several principles that require you to understand exactly what data you have, how and why it was obtained and how long you have had it.
Storing excessive amounts of data for reasons that could be deemed unnecessary and beyond the accepted retention period can result in non-compliance with the GDPR, and may land you with hefty fines. The more data you have, the harder it becomes to stay on top of all these factors.
It’s about time
As we reported in our recent blog post ‘Why waste your time?’, businesses are spending too much time searching for information internally. Duplicate documents can be a real headache, as can poor version control, which causes not only time delays in trying to determine which is the most up to date version of a document, it can also create problems when customers are presented with out of date or inaccurate information (i.e. the wrong version).
All of these issues are exacerbated and become harder to control as your data multiplies.
Discover more
To help counteract the issues linked to data growth, organisations can arm themselves with understanding and insight about their full data asset estate. This can then inform decisions and actions around deduplication, redaction, reorganisation, retention, purging, policy development and much more.
SimSage’s Discover tool sheds light on your company’s data, including the extent and location of all personal, confidential and financial information. We can help you identify the age of documents, find duplicates, and unearth ‘dark data’; all presented in a comprehensive and accessible report.
