Companies Overspend on Unnecessary, Redundant Data

MBA (8/11/2008 ) Palaparty, Vijay
Organizations attempting to store all of their data may be overspending on unnecessary or redundant data storage while paying for costly maintenance, according to a report from Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn.
"The current explosion of information is outpacing decline in storage prices even before resource costs for maintaining data are taken into account," said Whit Andrews, vice president and analyst at Gartner and co-author of a report, Too Much, Too Old: Information Access Technology Enables Valuation and Reduction of Legacy Data.

Jonathan Corr, chief strategy officer at Ellie Mae, Pleasanton, Calif., said electronic data storage can be expensive when companies do not store it effectively.

“If companies store data in a regular transactional database—the same database that they utilize for ongoing business—it can become costly from both a performance standpoint as well as the cost of storage,” Corr said. “The correct way to store electronic information is to archive and put it in separate storage. This is done for information that companies only need on an ad hoc or sporadic basis, whether it's for historic reporting or other reasons.”

The report said having more data is not necessarily better and that organizations should streamline and modernize information and access systems, identify redundant information and eliminate applications that are required to handle the information.

“Information access technologies can provide a shaft through which to view information that no longer has value as well as a mechanism for extracting it,” Andrews said. “Companies that previously made retention decisions based on intuitive judgments about what was important can now designate criticality based on more advanced approaches for measuring the value of content. These improved judgments are extremely valuable for shared storage and could also be useful for personal storage."

Gartner said organizations tend to hold on to information because of potential threats of litigation or regulatory action, or even a general fear of losing it. However, a recent survey from AT&T Inc., said 30 percent of U.S. businesses do not prioritize business continuity and disaster recovery preparedness, which focuses primarily on securing an organization’s information.

Of the 71 percent of survey respondents who said business continuity planning is a priority, 43 percent said it had always been a priority and 28 percent said it had become a priority in recent years as a result of heightened awareness of natural disasters, security and terrorist threats.

Information access technology, however, comes with high cost too, Andrews said. Licenses range from $10,000 for smaller deployments up to $3 million for more advanced applications. Estimated annual maintenance costs are 18 percent. "Many enterprises will use a search platform that is already installed for the purpose of cleaning up legacy information, and benefits will still accrue if they have to buy new information access technology,” he said.

“For electronic storage to make sense, it should be compact, efficient and cost-effective,” Corr said. “When done correctly, it saves significantly over paper storage and is far more effective from a productivity standpoint."