The risks of saving too much data
August 9, 2010 by Steve HannafordPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Storage, Uncategorized
Saving data can go too far, according to the results of a recent survey from security software company Symantec.
The study found that many companies have no clear digital retention policy, and, as a result, end up saving almost everything forever.
The result is an exponential growth of saved data and a corresponding rise in expense in storage media and data management overhead.
The key is developing data deletion policies that allow your company to delete unneeded data at regular intervals without running afoul of the law. According to Symantec, less than half of the corporations surveyed had any such policies in place.
According to the survey’s authors, the cost of storage is one factor, but the cost of retrieving data grows even faster. Many companies still us tape backup as an archiving system, a procedure that leads to enormous overhead costs for retrieval.
The key recommendations of the survey include:
- Setting up a comprehensive archiving system
- Distinguishing between backups (data dumps for retaining data from a system crash) and archives (which should be automatically structured, indexed and easy to search), and
- Developing and enforcing an information retention policy that spells out what data is permanent and what can and must be deleted at regular intervals.
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Tags: backups, data retention, policies, study, Symantec
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