Cheaper storage costs can’t keep up with data volumes

Storage costs might be getting cheaper but it isn’t happening fast enough to keep up with the rapid increase in data volumes.

Founder of the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Counsel (CGOC) Deidre Paknad writes that 90 per cent of the world’s data was created in just the last two years. CGOC has found that the majority of this data has no business or legal value to a company. Companies that are able to dispose of unnecessary data are able to reduce the costs of IT and legal and pass on the savings to shareholders. So how does a company weed out the valuable data from the junk?

According to Paknad, most storage cost-cutting programs are skirting the surface and don’t deal with the real cause of excess data because IT isn’t able to identify what data should be retained. Deleting data is risky business, with a billion possible combinations of legal and/or business value to any one enterprise employee and a single information source. The Information Governance Reference Model is helping IT negotiate the data minefield with its framework for determining and balancing data value with infrastructure availability. Paknad reports CGOC and similar organisations are collaborating with legal, compliance, records, business and IT departments from large global organisations to establish standards to help cut storage costs.

How SilverDane sees it…. reducing data storage in enterprises is a major undertaking and requires cooperation from multiple departments, each holding a piece to the puzzle that is determining what data is valuable and what can be safely deleted. It’s great to see collaboration efforts to cut the costs of storage.