Show Me the Light

Data Extraction

The IDC estimate that by 2011, our “digital universe” – consisting of digitally-based text, video, images, music, etc. – will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. (1)

Given the pace of change in IT, an organisation’s data archive mediums eventually become outdated.

Outdated archive mediums are no excuse where compliance is concerned. All data, stored across all archive mediums, need to be accounted for, managed correctly and permanently available.

Deduplication

Organisations face the challenge of wasted IT time and storage resources due to the continual and unnecessary backup of non-valuable and duplicate data. Organisations can deliver real, measurable savings including lower storage costs, faster data accessibility and IT labour efficiencies through deduplication initiatives and backup policy reviews.

Intel® recently undertook a successful deduplication and storage optimisation initiative that delivered significant ROI:

"By taking a holistic approach to storage optimisation, we identified opportunities to reduce our storage capacity requirements 27 percent over the next five years, keep operations costs nearly constant, and deliver significant ROI." (3)

Tape Recovery

As the value of your organisation’s data increases, so does the value of your data backups. But what do you do when the worst happens, there is a data loss scenario but your backup tape (or the data on it) is inaccessible?

In a recent study, The Ponemon Institute found that in 2008 the total average costs of a data loss grew to £60 per record compromised. This was a 28 percent increase on 2007 (£47 per record). The study also revealed that the average cost of a data loss disaster to those organisations surveyed was more than £1.73 million (up from £1.42 million in 2007) and ranged from £160,000 to over £4.8 million. (4)

Monitoring and evaluating the physical and logical condition of tape backups (and extracting the data if necessary) will go some way to helping ensure archives can be relied upon as a backup source of data in a loss scenario.

Data Consolidation

‘The quantity of digital information is growing faster than our ability to store it. It is estimated that 281 exabytes (281 quintillion bytes) of digital information were produced in 2007 … Of course not all of that information is worth preserving.’ Blue Ribbon task Force, December 2008.

In the current economic climate, organisations can ill-afford to maintain redundant and duplicate data, stored across multiple media types. The costs associated with increased backup times and frequencies, the additional strain on the IT infrastructure of unnecessary duplicate data and the physical storage costs of housing media can all be avoided through a simple consolidation exercise.

Data Audit

In 2007, the IDC estimated that approximately 20 percent of the data an organisation manages would be valuable enough to store for 10 years or more. By 2011, that percentage is predicted to rise to about a third. (5) The need for robust data auditing protocols is further highlighted in a recent Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) report, in which it was concluded that organisations need to draw distinction between temporary and preservable information through effective appraisal and selection processes. (5)

Data audits not only save an organisation money providing significant ROI through effective data consolidation - they also help identify the location of sensitive proprietary and commercially valuable data that may require additional backup and relocation.

Those organisations that ignore this simple procedure may run into significant difficulties as data volumes continue to rapidly increase.

Conversion & Migration

The BRTF note that digital preservation and access to data requires long-range planning and support. The agreement on formats, standards, implementation of interoperable hardware and software systems, and the collaboration of all stakeholders are prerequisites for successful long-term planning. (4)

Constant monitoring of historical data is a prerequisite for modern organisations to avoid conversion and migration projects becoming unwieldy and unnecessarily costly. Employing a proactive stance on legacy data management will provide significant ROI in the middle and long-term.