Johannesburg, 01 Apr 2019
As the RMS Titanic tragically found out, with an iceberg, only 10-15% sits above water and is visible, while the rest is hidden beneath the waves. Because it is unseen, it's dangerous, and sometimes even deadly. It's a very similar situation when it comes to corporate data, as the exponential growth of both structured and unstructured data means that more often than not, companies simply do not know what they have or where it resides. This lack of knowledge leaves the organisation in danger of an unexpected disaster that could potentially sink the business.
David McMurdo, regional director, South Africa at Veritas, points out that the company recently undertook a massive, independent research report into organisational data management, covering some 1 475 respondents across 14 countries, with over 100 CIOs from South Africa participating in the Databerg Survey.
"Specifically, we asked the CIOs questions around how they would classify data within their infrastructure, and the answers were eye-opening. In South Africa it was found that 28% of the identified information within an organisation could be classified as business critical data, in other words, that which is considered as vital to the ongoing operational success of the enterprise. This would be clean data, which has a recognisable business value and thus needs to be protected and proactively managed," he says.
South Africa is showing a significantly positive trend compared to the EMEA region, where on average only 10% of the data is classified as clean data.
"A further 31% of the information was identified as being redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) data, which encompasses information that is duplicated, out-of-date and thus no longer has any business value to the organisation - for example employees' personal data, such as photos, that are stored on their work computer and thus are backed up to the corporate servers."
In the ROT data classification, South Africa has seen a small improvement of 1% from the 32% shown in the 2016 survey.
While South Africa has seen a significant reduction in the dark data from 58% in 2016 to 41% in 2018, the real challenge, continues McMurdo, is still in the area of dark data. Dark data is data whose value has not yet been identified, and is essentially the equivalent to the underwater part of the iceberg. He adds that dark data may include vital, business critical information as well as useless ROT data. Regardless of which, though, it is something that consumes a lot of resources and needs to be identified as soon as possible, so it can be properly dealt with.
"The report actually suggests that dark data will account for wasted corporate resources of up to R11,8 trillion in the EMEA region by 2020, unless organisations change their behaviour toward information management. Doing so makes sense - if you could free up nearly 60% of your current storage infrastructure just by cleaning up your data, it's easy to realise the kind of costs that would be saved."
"In order to avoid spiralling future data management costs and the risk of sweeping sanctions, South African organisations need to take action in order to reduce their databergs, by illuminating the dark data; losing the ROT that currently clogs organisations; and encouraging employees to proactively maintain and manage that data which is vital to the business," continues McMurdo.
With the prediction that just over 51% of data will be stored in the cloud in the next 12 months, it's important that companies pay attention to their ROT and dark data to ensure only the business critical data is moved to the cloud.
Once enterprises have such visibility, he says, it becomes easier to decide what data to keep and what to get rid of. It also enables more informed business decisions to be taken, while at the same time freeing up infrastructure and reducing costs significantly.
"Furthermore, it is worth noting that in an era where big data and analytics are being utilised to gain competitive advantage, these tools can only be effective if they are fed the right information. Knowing what information you have and what data is business critical means you can deliver clean data into the system, enabling your organisation to use data to make better business decisions."
There are many ways to put a figure to the value of data stored by an organisation. Typically, the cost of storing and processing data has been by its business value. This is the best way to manage data storage as it ensures organisations aren't paying to store either low value data or unnecessary amounts of data. In South Africa, between the 2016 and 2018 Databerg reports, businesses shifted from 52% of them evaluating their data in this manner, to only 37% in 2018.
Budgets could be negatively impacted by allocating budget according to data size rather than business value, cautions McMurdo.
"In the end, if South Africa organisations truly want to begin leveraging their vast reservoirs of data to boost customer service and improve their business capabilities, they need to gain clear visibility of their information, take action on that which is no longer needed and, ultimately, assume control of their data in a manner that will significantly improve their business," he concludes.
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