Veritas executive asks firms to stop digital hoarding

Louis Tague, ANZ managing director for Veritas, said as the volume of data escalated, it was no longer cost-effective or efficient for businesses to store and backup all information, regardless of type or value.

He made the comments on Friday which has been designated as World Backup Day.

Veritas is owned by Symantec with which it merged in 2005.

{loadposition sam08}Tague said that the amount of data being stored was growing at at exponential rate, spurred on by growth in big data, adoption of cloud computing and the explosion of rich data such as video.

"World Backup Day is a reminder that backing up all information regardless of type or value is no longer viable," he said.

"The business costs of contending with escalating data increase every day. In fact, storing all this data could cost companies as much as US$891 billion by 2020. This is a data storage cost that can be avoided and reduced considerably."

Tague said that when it came to back-up, simply investing in more and more storage capacity was not the answer.

"Recent research found that 41% of files hadn’t been modified in the past three years. In a 10 petabyte storage environment, it would cost in the region of US$20.5 million per year to manage and retain 41 stale, redundant data."

He characterised most Australian organisations as struggling with exponential data growth.

"Many are hoarding every scrap of data, irrespective of value, on the off-chance it is needed in the future. According to a recent survey, 67% of office pros and 85% of IT decision makers in Australia admit they are digital hoarders," Tague pointed out.

"Businesses should use World Backup Day to break this cycle. It is an opportunity to review data and determine what is business critical before backing it up, while deleting data that doesn’t drive business value.

"This will help organisations cut storage costs, while maximising the availability and business value of useful data."