Improved storage technology means you can keep almost all the information you generate and receive nowadays. That’s great, but it can also make finding the particular file you need, when you need it, a whole lot harder – especially if you have been a bit haphazard with how you name files and organise folders. Welcome to the new world of data retention and management
It’s not big news that storage is cheap and getting cheaper – in 1957, one megabyte cost over $US400m to store. In 2010, it cost less than two cents. Today, it costs less than half a cent.
Back in 2012, research firm IDC and IT solution provider EMC (now DellEMC) said there’d be 40 zettabytes of data in the world by 2020 – that’s 40 billion terabytes (40 trillion gigabytes). This year, software company Veritas estimated that unstructured or ‘dark’ data (information that isn’t laid out in searchable tables like databases) can account for 90 per cent of information stored by an organisation.
Put simply, people don’t know what they have got, or how to retrieve easily. That means finding mission critical data can cost a business time and money.
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