Guest Column: Overcoming Data Pack Rat Syndrome

By Steve Akers, President and CEO, Digital Reef

Storage isn't necessarily a glamorous topic, but in these times of ever-tightening budgets, effective storage management can hold the key to some dramatic cost savings for enterprises. This is why storage management is surfacing as a hot topic these days. Even with the cost of spindles dropping, enterprises are taking a hard look at their expanding storage volumes and wondering if they can find ways to chisel away at the mountains of data.

Most IT professionals don't question whether or not there is useless, or potentially risky, data taking up valuable space on enterprise servers or in outside storage. They know this is the case. The problem is that the majority of enterprises can't answer questions like, "What data do I have? Is this data valuable or putting the organization at risk?" and "Where exactly is it?" This is particularly true when it comes to unstructured data. And since unstructured data makes up the bulk of corporate information assets (more than 85% according to some experts), terabytes and even petabytes of unstructured data remain a mystery to the people responsible for it. This is precisely how Data Pack Rat Syndrome came to be. Enterprises couldn't discern data assets from junk content, so they did the only thing they could do— save just about everything.