25 percent of employees store private data on company devices and infrastructure

Veritas Technologies, a leader in information management, today announced new data from the global research Global Databerg Report.

The research reveals that as much as 52 percent of data currently stored worldwide can be considered “dark,” meaning that their true value and significance are unknown. The next 33 percent of data can be considered redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT – redundant, obsolete, trivial) and it is known that this segment of data is useless. If companies and organizations do not seriously address this issue, by 2020, $3.3 trillion will be spent globally on storing unnecessary data.

Organizations today are creating and storing more and more data due to the prevailing culture of keeping everything – both important and unimportant – and collecting all kinds of data with a completely indifferent attitude towards the rules for retaining certain types of data. Among the data, there may be important and valuable business data, but also data that should not be kept longer than a certain period or should not be kept at all.

The research shows that IT department leaders consider only 15 percent of the stored data to be critical for business. An average-sized organization that stores about 1,000 TB (terabytes) of data today spends up to $650,000 annually on storing business-unimportant information.

“The first step in addressing this problem is certainly to confront it and acknowledge that there is a culture of mass data collection and accumulation in companies and other organizations today,” said Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer at Veritas. “More and more organizations realize that this is the problem. Most of them face difficulties because they do not know which data to start with, what risks may be present in that process, and how to identify data that has some value. When companies gain insight into their environment and data, they can make decisions faster, do so with more confidence, and also more easily involve other business participants in that process,” emphasized Gibson.

Veritas’s Global Databerg Report is based on insights from over 2,500 IT professionals from 22 countries around the world. The Global Databerg Report follows closely after the recently published Data Genomics Index (Data Genomics Index), the first precise insight into what data is stored in companies, based on the analysis of billions of different files. The Data Genomics Index showed that over 40 percent of stored data has not been touched or processed in the last three years and can therefore be considered obsolete. The Global Databerg Report confirms that IT department leaders are aware of this problem.

These two studies for the first time in the IT industry combine the employee perspective with the factual state of what exists among stored files, and therefore Veritas hopes that this data and results will be a catalyst for organizations to finally confront the dramatic increase in the amount of data they have witnessed in recent years.

Most business data is below the surface

One of the main conclusions of the Global Databerg Report is that, on average, 52 percent of data in global companies is below the surface, meaning it is “dark” data. “Dark” data is data that is in the “dark” because the company does not recognize it: this data is redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT), or it may be valuable business data that is “clean” but the company simply does not know about it.

In this regard, companies in Germany, Canada, and Australia have fared the worst, with data in as much as 66, 64, and 62 percent of cases concluded to be “dark” data, while companies in the United States are around the middle of the list with about 54 percent of “dark” data.

The highest share of “clean” data (data for which it is known what they represent) in the total amount of data was found in China (25 percent “clean” data), Israel (24 percent), and Brazil (22 percent) – but this still means that more than 75 percent of the data stored in these countries is “dark” or has no value for the business itself.

Fear of the ‘Delete’ button

Data that can be classified as ROT data has already been recognized by companies as redundant, obsolete, or trivial, irrelevant to business, and they are aware that this data has little or no value for business. Despite this, 48 percent of all data stored in Denmark, 44 percent of data stored in the Netherlands, and 43 percent of data in the United Arab Emirates belong to this category. In the United States, 30 percent of data is ROT data.

The race to the cloud relentlessly feeds the large iceberg of data (Databerg)

The acceptance of cloud storage is increasingly growing, as well as the more frequent use of cloud applications, which is expected to increase by about a third of today’s users already during 2016 – cloud services will be used by 46 percent of companies by the end of the year, compared to today’s 33 percent. Brazil and the US will be the leading countries as it is expected that about 61 percent of data in those countries will be in the cloud by the end of this year.

Although cost reduction is the reason that primarily stands behind this decision to move to the cloud in the short term, there is increasing concern about the costs associated with vendor lock-in in the future – pushing data to the cloud can simply push the problem further into the future, which all increases the dimensions of the problem of “dark” and unclassified dark data.

Employees increasingly use company infrastructure as their own

We could say that employees are increasingly “hitchhiking” and using company resources as if they were their own, storing on corporate infrastructure data for which the company pays, and from which it derives no benefit at all. On average, 26.5 percent of employees store their personal data on devices provided to them by the company. Since much of this data is “dark,” the IT department simply cannot know and say which data has business value and which is simply – cat videos.

There is more private data on corporate networks than ever

If companies do not know what data is stored on resources belonging to the company, this is very risky behavior that will be difficult – or almost impossible – to justify with simple “ignorance” in the event of a regulatory or criminal investigation.

More than 25 percent of employees store their private data on business devices, including personal documents, legal or identification documents (57 percent of employees do just that), photos (57 percent), music (47 percent), videos (33 percent), and games (26 percent). This may seem harmless at first glance, but many of these documents can lead to problems due to new privacy regulations in certain countries or can cause significant issues in the area of copyright infringement.