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Information Governance: Saving Data for Big Data Analytics Projects of the Future
Organizations are increasingly capable of capturing huge amounts of data, and so they’re doing just that. IDC says that data will continue to grow by 50 percent annually through 2016. All the massive troves of stored data has led to the rise of Big Data for analyzing and teasing important information from it.
But storing data is expensive. Is it worth the cost of keeping it around? The Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council, for example, says that 69 percent of data being kept by businesses today has no business, legal or regulatory value. Analysts estimate that information stored in databases alone are maintained at an average cost of $18,000 per gigabyte, and storage costs today average 20 percent of the typical IT budget. So keeping data around past the point where it is no longer needed saves money and streamlines operations. Removing unneeded information also reduces regulatory issues and burdens.
But recently there is a flip-side argument too. The opposing argument (one practiced by Google and likely FaceBook and others) goes that companies should be collecting and storing every piece of data that they can. Even if they don’t have a clue for what the value of the data is today, sometime in the future that data could become very valuable, for example, in a bigger analytics project that might stretch backward in time to include today’s pieces of historical information. And the Big Data of today will likely be considered Small Peanuts tomorrow as storage media capacity continues to become denser and available at ever cheaper prices.
Keep it or Dump it? Which course to follow, of course is a business decision, and like any other decision, this one requires strategy and forethought. One solution is to fall back on the principles of standard Information Governance (IG). But in addition to standard IG criteria we may need to also consider potential future value of data when deciding the lifecycle to be assigned to data.
Richard Neale, Marketing Manager at ENTOTA, said that “it’s difficult to justify why big data should be exempt from the normal rules of data governance. If you short cut this important process, you’ll end up with a very large mess.”
