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Storage and Compliance: Knowing What to Delete
Data Management and Compliance is not just about being able to save and retrieve. It’s also about knowing what you can delete and when.
There is a lot of fear around the process of deletion. The fear of accidentally deleting something that may later turn out to be a key asset that should have been kept is hard to overcome. And data storage prices are dropping. Why not just keep everything? Something in there some day may prove to be useful.
But the costs involved in keeping data longer than needed can be high. A Gartner study did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and assumed
that if an average worker stores 10GB of data and that it would cost $5 per year to backup one Gigabyte. That means that a 5000-person company would be paying $1.25 million for storage.
eDiscovery presents another wrinkle. When you have more data available, there is simply more data available that may need to be searched. And the eDiscovery search process can be tedious and involved.
To develop a coherent policy around data retention, Gartner suggests that companies enact a process of “content valuation” that weights the importance of a document based on many parameters that might include things like author, authority, patterns of usage and business purpose. The idea should be to address high-risk, high-volume applications and databases. Trying to target every application and database within a company can prove to be exhausting and of diminishing returns.
