How to Achieve Victory Over ROT

Most IT managers weren’t born yesterday. They know that a certain percentage of the data they painstakingly retain and curate is useless. But 70%?

The content retained by most organizations falls into three categories: records, operational information, and data that is redundant, outdated, or trivial (ROT). Records are vital and must be retained and protected. Operational data is what is needed for the day-to-day running of your organization. And ROT is the rest.

It may come as a shock, but it’s not uncommon for 70% of the data retained by an organization to be ROT. Duplicate email messages, multiple copies of a single document, and big slide presentations can consume many megabytes of storage space. After a while, that really adds up. It’s also where uncontrolled content with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Health Information (PHI) hides. And are you willing to bet there are no cat videos on any of your organization’s storage devices?

The downside of ROT

ROT costs money and creates unnecessary risk. To store and protect it, your organization must pay for storage infrastructure, whether solid state, disk, or tape. That infrastructure requires floor space, electrical power, cooling, and staff to monitor and manage. If you are migrating on-premises applications and data to the cloud, you certainly don’t want to move reams of ROT to your cloud provider, where it will just inflate your monthly bills.

And what about backup and recovery? You don’t want to lose vital data to the next hurricane, and you don’t want mission-critical data to fall into the clutches of ransomware actors, so you must diligently maintain backup and recovery copies. Is ROT worth that trouble and expense? The question answers itself.

Taking Control of Your Data

It’s time to take control of your data. But cleaning the house is not easy. Identifying and deleting ROT takes time, processing power, and plenty of labor. Your staff has better things to do. Rather than burden your workers with such a tedious task, a better approach is to rely on a cloud-based service that automatically classifies content according to whether it contains vital records, operational data, or ROT. In one case, a cloud-based service helped a California utility remove over 60 terabytes of data.

Look for a cloud-based service that can find neglected files, identify document owners, spot duplicate content, and discover records containing unencrypted personally identifiable information (PII) that put your organization at risk. Your service should also identify less-active data that is worth retaining so you can migrate it to an archive and manage it according to its compliance requirements at lower cost.

When you do migrate from on-premises to a cloud-based application, you will be able to make the move with the knowledge that only useful data that is properly indexed is making the trip, while ROT is being left behind for deletion.

Benefits of Eliminating ROT

Isolating and eliminating ROT will deliver the benefits of lower storage costs and reduced risk of data causing regulatory violations or falling into the wrong hands. But perhaps most important, you will be able to gain value from vital records and current operational data, making them available to analytics applications where they can be the source of strategic insights. And because your records will be reduced in size, queries and searches will go much faster.

Data storage capacity is a terrible thing to waste. Reclaiming up to 70% of it by getting rid of ROT will pay your organization lasting dividends.