Dark data clogging up company computers

A report by an IT company revealed on Wednesday that a huge mass of data is clogging up storage facilities at businesses across the globe.

The report‚ by Veritas Technologies‚ says that companies in South Africa and in Europe‚ the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) have created a “Databerg”‚ a massive block of “dark‚ useless and expensive data”.

“More than half of the Databerg consists of Dark Data – data which is collected but remains unused‚” the back-up and recovery solutions company said.

Veritas’s Databerg Report 2015 looked at how public and private sector organisations across Europe‚ the Middle East and Africa manage their data.

“The major issue the research found‚ is that companies in South Africa have one of the third highest rate of ‘dark’ data stored in their corporate networks. According to the Databerg Report‚ 58% of data hold by South African organisations would be unknown to IT professionals. This could contain everything from holiday snaps to pirated content‚ creating a high risk of non-compliance‚” Veritas said.

“The study also reveals the discipline of South African’s employees is one of the worst in the region. One in three employees would treat their company’s IT as their own and upload photos‚ non-approved software or copies of their personal legal and identity documents on corporate networks.

This only adds up to the 32% of trivial data South African organisations are currently holding.”

The report revealed that cloud storage and processing would increase by a third from 33% to 45% across EMEA over the next twelve months.

It identified three major causes for Databerg growth.

“These relate to how data volumes disproportionately affect IT strategy‚ how vendor hype is driving the widespread adoption of currently ‘free’ storage and how employees are endangering corporate data through their own actions and becoming data hoarders.”

The report recommends that companies:

• Identify dark data‚ expose risk and recognise valuable information
• Eliminate Redundant‚ Obsolete and Trivial data promptly to reduce wasted costs
• Define a workable information governance strategy for unstructured data
• Increase business agility by utilising cloud storage environments

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