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Data Retention Survey Shows Companies Don’t “Do As I Say….”

August 24, 2010

A June 2010 survey from Symantec shows an interesting split between attitude and actions when it comes to data retention and disposition. In fact, it shows that most organizations don’t follow their own advice. Most organizations (87%) believe a proper information retention strategy would allow them to delete unnecessary information. But, fewer than half (46%) actually have a formal information retention plan in place.

Such a practice has a number of negative consequences: the amount of money invested in storage capacity continues to grow, the amount of time it takes to backup servers and databases increases exponentially, and the additional storage increases the costs associated with legal hold preservation and production. As a result, these businesses spend far more time and money on the negative consequences of poor information management and discovery practices than they would by working to change them.

Brian Dye, vice president of product management, Information Management Group, Symantec, says, "Infinite retention results in infinite waste. The sheer volume of data is growing exponentially, so trying to keep everything consumes large amounts of storage space and demands too much of IT's resources."

The consequences of such practices are costly and harmful to the organization. Storage costs are skyrocketing as over retention has created an environment where it is now 1,500 times more expensive to review data than it is to store it. Also, backup windows are increasing while recovery times have become prohibitive. And, with the massive amounts of information stored on difficult-to-access backup tapes, e-discovery has become a lengthy, inefficient, and costly exercise.

The survey was conducted in June 2010 and is based on responses from 1,680 senior IT and legal executives in 26 countries.

Diane Carlisle, CRM

NewsWire

Data Retention Information Management