Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. what is data hoarding. Data hoarding is the excessive collection and retention of data. It is also sometimes referred to as digital hoarding. It is a growing challenge in the tech space. Countless organizations have a field time keeping on purchasing more and more storage space to accommodate the growing amount of data. Not just structured data but unstructured data is also growing enormously, necessitating increasing amounts of precious storage space. This is also leading to a major problem of disconnected data silos. Just as hoarding things in real life can be a problem, and mind you, Marie Kondo wrote a whole book about dealing with this, hoarding in the digital world is also a problem. This commonly happens when organizations tend to save data, maybe out of habit, out of the fear of losing it, out of hope that it will be useful someday, or even simply because they didn’t know any better.

A new study has found that 47% of consumers would stop buying from a company that fails to control how much unnecessary or unwanted data it is storing. Compare this to the fact that in this environment, 60% of Gen Z consumers have online accounts that they no longer use, and about 69% have never tried to close these unused accounts. This was found in a study conducted by Veritas Technologies. Useless data about these accounts lies unused in data centers, which keep using up electricity and resources. Experts opine that such useless data could account for roughly 2% of all global carbon emissions. 2% may not sound like a lot but to put this in perspective, take this – this size of the carbon footprint is the same size of the entire airline industry put together, the entire global aviation industry together! Now does that feel huge? Data centers around the world run 24 by 7 and by 2030, they are expected to be using up about 8% of all electricity that gets produced on the planet.

In the middle of that is the fact that most consumers are absolutely unaware of the impact of their own carbon footprint. 44% of the consumers surveyed said that it was wrong for businesses to waste energy and cause pollution by storing unnecessary information online. However, 51% also believe that electronic versions of their account-related statements and other documents stored online do not have any negative environmental impact. The Veritas study also found that 49% of the consumers surveyed thought that it was the responsibility of the organizations that store this data to delete it when it is no longer required or useful.

There is a slightly older study, conducted again, by Veritas Research, which found that about 35% of the enterprise data is dark. Dark data means that the data has an unknown value. It also found that about 50% of the data stored by organizations is redundant, obsolete, or trivial. A good move in this direction is that a lot of companies are now including the environmental impact of their data storage in their corporate environmental, social, and governance reports.

According to a report by the IDC, about 60% of the storage budget is not really spent on storage. Instead, it is spent on secondary copies of data for data protection, such as backups, backup software licenses, replication, and disaster recovery. It also found that about one-third of IT organizations are spending most of their IT storage on this secondary data. This makes it important for organizations to define cold data storage strategies and work on establishing unstructured data management policies. The risk of not identifying and eliminating unnecessary data, basically the risk of not stopping data hoarding is too huge to ignore any longer.