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Data: Massive Carbon Emissions Attributed to Long-term Storage of Unused Data
We’ve been convinced that storing data digitally saves trees and is a green pursuit. The flip side to storing data electronically though is that it has become too easy to do and increasingly data and documents are being stored that may never be used again or which duplicate the same information stored elsewhere.
Maintaining and storing digital waste long term can result in massive amounts of CO2 gas being pumped into the atmosphere. Veritas estimates that 6.4 million tons of CO2 is emitted annually into the atmosphere as a result of storing digital waste, something which Veritas calls ‘dark data’. More than one-third of all data stored can be classified as unneeded dark data.
Phil Brace, Chief Sustainability Officer and Executive Vice President at Veritas, said that “around the world, individuals and companies are working to reduce their carbon footprints, but dark data doesn’t often feature on people’s action lists. However, dark data is producing more carbon dioxide than 80 different countries do individually, so it’s clear that this is an issue that everyone needs to start taking really seriously. Filtering dark data, and deleting the information that’s not needed, should become a moral imperative for businesses everywhere.”
To reduce the amount of dark data stored within an organization, it’s necessary to monitor and identify this files that are redundant or obsolete, and then remove them. This takes some analysis, but for large organizations the exercise can be worth the effort.
