Slashdot Mirror
To Purge Or Not To Purge Your Data
Lucas123 writes "The average company pays from $1 million to $3 million per terabyte of data during legal e-discovery. The average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up — so a 5,000-worker company will pay out $1.25 million for five years of storage. So while you need to pay attention to retaining data for business and legal requirements, experts say you also need to be keeping less, according to a story on Computerworld. The problem is, most organizations hang on to more data than they need, for much longer than they should. 'Many people would prefer to throw technology at the problem than address it at a business level by making changes in policies and processes.'"
The problem is that it's easier to just archive the cruft stuff than it is to go through it all and figure out what's worth keeping.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
$250k a year for a 5000 employee company? To put it in perspective, if the average employee at this company is making $60k a year, this company will be paying $1.5 billion in salaries over the same 5 years. To be fair, I think the estimated cost from the article is very much underestimated. But while corporate storage costs more than you'd think, and companies are definately storing a whole bunch of data they don't need, what about the costs of reviewing and purging that data? That is straight up time, whether it's reviewing existing data or spending the time to create guidelines for which data to keep. And time costs money. More than storage.
Whale
10 GB of data per user, sure.
10 GB of user data, no way.
If assuming 300 work days per employee, that would mean that the average employee creates 1.2 kB of data per second.
The only way this could be true is if you count data that isn't user generated, and they count the total data storage for the company and divide it by employees.
If so, users deleting their e-mails won't have much of an effect.
Apps aren't really well designed for this in mind. They don't come at the problem from a "document lifecycle" perspective but instead a "document creation".
This is generally because data has a variable lifespan. Lets take an email as part of a project as an example. As the author I may decide that the email isn't needed after a week so set an expiry of 1 week. But you, as the recipient, may take that email and turn that into several tasks so for you the email is much more important and thus want to keep it for much longer.
Users aren't really going to be good at making these decisions unless some application continually bombards them with "go check the status of these 1000 documents you've got".
It's not so much that you want your company to have a leg to stand on, its that you don't want your legal opposition to get their foot in the door. Innocent until proven guilty remember?
In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
The top 500 company I worked for did just the opposite: Destroy all data in case a legal issue comes up.
They called it 'desk cleanout day', and unless you were an official dedicated contact on a particular subject you were to wipe all correspondence of more than a year old.
(There were also other grades of information, but erase after a year was the default).
I don't know what most major companies' policies are regarding backing up emails (just back up the text or back up emails plus attachments) but, as but one example, I'm sure this would be an easy spot for most companies to dramatically reduce the amount of storage space required. Most business communications I see from corporate personnel have various attachments on every email - things like logos, custom backgrounds, etc. Forget getting rid of all the unnecessary attachments - getting rid of the "look at my pretty email that looks like a page from a spiral-bound notebook with my company logo at the bottom" images, and the hundreds and thousands of duplicates of those images, would reduce storage requirements, bandwidth requirements, and probably make corporate communications look more, you know, professional. So many emails are filled with unnecessary garbage and, if that's being backed up, that garbage can get costly.
Then again, I'm biased - I believe email should just be pure text. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm now old...
Additionally, there are many businesses that don't understand their data retention requirements beyond 'we need to keep some data for 10 years', so instead of compartmentalizing their data and saying 'keep this for 10 years, that for 5 years, and purge this every year and that every 3 months', they just keep everything. Further, if they have a data retention requirement for 3 years or 10 years, they might wait longer before purging it just because it's easier to keep it then it is to go find and remove the 5 or 12 year old data.
I only recently organized some data being maintained by the company I work for that was basically divided into 'archived' and 'live' data, logs generated by a many-user application. The 'archived' data went back 4 or 5 years with no easy distinction between data that was many years old and data that was generated in the most recent archive. Now at least the data is sorted by date (and being archived by date), so that when someone decides on how long we want to keep it (they can't seem to make up their mind, and while everyone seems to agree that we don't need data from 2005 and earlier, no one's willing to say I can delete it, either), it won't be hard to dump the older data at least on an annual or semi-annual basis.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on just this question in 2004, and estimated that file deletion was not productive unless we could do it at a rate of at least 17MB per minute (of labor). Four years later the threshold is probably at least 45MB per minute.
Generally, this means that if we can blow away whole disks or huge directories of data, it may pay off. Users going through their files one by one is usually an absolute waste.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Congratulations. You're the first person I've seen who understands that.
Accounting understands the need to close one year and open the next. They have processes for what is carried over and how it is identified.
Yet no other department (or application) understands the need to close old data and archive it.