Information Growth and Waste: This is not a new problem and customers are probably tired of hearing it, but in reality the problem is only getting worse. It’s estimated that unstructured data is now approximately 80% of the data being managed, often with infrastructures that were originally designed for corporate transactional data. To make the situation worse, up to 70% of that data is duplicate and hasn’t been accessed in more than 90 days.
Fear of Deletion: There are many schools of thought about how long to keep information. Some are ultra conservative and don’t want to keep anything. These are the minority. The majority ends up keeping everything forever. This is driven primarily by the fear of deletion or “what if I need this in the future?” Organizations without a formal retention and deletion policy tend to over retain information well past its usable life. Over retention is the primary driver for the first point we made about Information Growth and Waste. However, the hidden problems to over retention lay in the backup system.
Search is Always a Fire Drill: When was the last time you looked on your calendar and saw an appointment from the legal team that you will need to search your entire infrastructure for an email from 18 months ago? Rarely if ever, that’s because searches and e-discovery are typically fire drills. Drop what you’re doing, find something and they needed it yesterday. Although the cost of storage is cheap and companies can store a lot of information and barely impact the budget it begins to add up and what was once a asset quickly becomes a liability. Symantec estimates the cost of to review a document for eDiscovery is approximately 1500 - 3000 times the cost to store that document. Taking into account the processing fees (~$1200/GB), Hosting fees (~$1400/GB), Legal review (~$200/hr) and the productivity time taken to find the document in the first place. This only gets worse when organizations dump everything into their backup system. If those tapes are offsite they’ll need to find the specific tape, pay to have it pulled and shipped back onsite, pay to put it back, etc. All these different processes lead to an inefficient discovery process which wastes time, money and gives the opponent competitive edge.