Stop The Data Management Insanity: Holiday Fund Drive

By David West, Vice President of Marketing & Business Development, CommVault

At this time of year, many IT departments conduct their own holiday fund drives to secure much-needed budget dollars for projects in the New Year. Before building detailed, cost-benefit analyses to justify any increased technology spends, I suggest stepping back to take a more holistic view of your enterprise data management challenges. What's causing you the most pain and why? I'd like to prescribe a three-step process to determine the answer to this question. This post covers the first step–cleaning out your junk drawer. I'll cover the other two–protecting your assets and search, access and recovery–in subsequent entries.

For a lot of companies I talk to, the biggest sore spot begins with managing data growth. The complaint I hear most is the constant struggle to keep up with escalating capacity demands. Too often, however, the admitted knee-jerk reaction to running out of capacity is "1-800-call EMC" and roll in another box. Problem delayed, not solved.

So before budgeting for more storage hardware, I recommend an analysis of your primary storage, followed by some serious housecleaning. Hardware companies don't want you to know this dirty little secret, but I like the metaphor industry analyst Jon Toigo uses to describe where to start – the "storage junk drawer." Instead of buying more boxes, consider how much stale, "contraband", personal, and inappropriate information is sitting on expensive primary storage? How much expensive storage is being consumed by old, irrelevant emails? Cleaning out the junk drawer saves lots of space. As Toigo has said in the article linked above, this can "return upwards of 50 to 70 percent of every disk you own back to productive use."

Sounds simple enough, right? Then why do so many companies have a "light-bulb" moment when I mention it's time to clean out their junk drawers and we can help? Most likely, they never imagined how much unwanted and unneeded data occupied their prime storage real estate. Identify and move off the old email, personal photos, music, video, ex-employees' files and "contraband" data. And, like most junk drawers, the scale of the disorganized clutter becomes really apparent once you add up the number of departments and remote offices each with their own private stash of data trash.

By removing old data and reorganizing the rest, you can reclaim substantial capacity without adding hardware. In tough economic times, this translates to found budget money that can be reallocated to more strategic technology and business initiatives. It should be a lot easier to cost-justify solutions that demonstrate real value to the company, such as finding new ways to better optimize, protect, move and manage the data that means the most to your bottom-line business.

So don't wait for spring-cleaning. Get rid of data in your storage junk drawer now so adding more capacity doesn't have to top the list of your holiday fund drive. Getting organized is a first step toward relieving pain while restoring some balance to your environment. I'll delve into more detail in future blogs about other steps you should take as part of an all-inclusive, holistic approach to enterprise data management.

In the meantime, what's in your junk drawer?