Data overload could cost organisations up to $3.3 trillion by 2020: Veritas

PUNE: A survey shows that 52% of all information stored and processed by organisations around the world is considered ‘dark’ data, whose value is unknown.

As per the Global Databerg Report released by information management firm Veritas Technologies, another 33% of data is considered redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) and is known to be useless. If left untamed, this dark and ROT business data will cost organisations a cumulative $3.3 trillion to manage by the year 2020.

Organisations are creating and storing data at an ever-increasing rate due to a ‘data hoarding’ culture and an indifferent attitude to retention policy. IT leaders consider just 15% of all stored data to be classified as business critical information. For the average midsized organization holding 1000TB of data, the cost to store their non-critical information is estimated at more than $650,000 annually, according to the report.

“Understanding and acknowledging that a data hoarding culture exists is a first step in addressing the problem,” said Ben Gibson, chief marketing officer, Veritas. “More and more organisations are realising it. The problem most face is they do not know what data to start with, what risk it may contain and where the value is discovered. Once they have visibility into that environment, they can make decisions faster, with more confidence, and bring in other business stakeholders to move forward with a well-conceived plan.”

Veritas surveyed over 2,500 IT professionals in 22 countries for the report. The survey found that on average 52% of all stored data is either dark or ROT. The worst dark data offenders are Germany, Canada and Australia with 66%, 64% and 62% of their stored data defined as dark, respectively. In the US, 54% of the data was unknown. The highest proportion of clean and identified business critical data was found in China (25% clean), Israel (24% clean) and Brazil (22% clean).

The report said 48% of all stored data in Denmark, 44% in the Netherlands and 43 % of all data in the United Arab Emirate, and 30% of US data is ROT data. Cloud adoption and processing is likely to further increase these numbers. The consumerisation of IT means an average of 26.5% of employees store personal data on their work devices and because so much is dark, IT cannot tell what has business value and what is just 'cat videos'.