And there's the rub: The bigger that data gets, the more effort required to put the genie back in the bottle. Worse still, the longer we wait to deal with the problem, the worse it becomes. Eventually, killing the genie and throwing away the bottle will seem like a much more attractive option.
Look across enterprise networks today and the same problem is plays itself out over and over. In some cases, the problem resides with people like myself who aren't organized enough to retain only the information they need. But even if all employees were exceptionally fastidious about managing their own data, I can almost guarantee you that the systems they use on a daily basis were built by people who weren't quite as tapped down.
Based my own experience working with hundreds of different networks, I can tell you that the back-end data management problem is in many ways worse than the end-user management problem. This isn't because IT people are lazier or less capable data managers. It's because they are seldom in a position to make life and death decisions about the data they are charged with managing.
Strictly speaking, the data IT manages isn't owned by IT. Sure, that copy of the Windows installation CD that's sitting on the system disk of every server you own -- that's your responsibility and you should take care of that. But copies of production databases that were made by a vendor during data conversions two or three years ago? As a system administrator, can you be absolutely sure you don't need that anymore? And if you can't, who can? Is there really anyone who is in a position to pass judgment on that years-old backup, who actually knows what it means to keep it or let it go?
This diffusion of responsibility puts IT in an impossible position. When data belongs to a user, he or she can make snap decisions about what stays or goes and accept the consequences. Shared ownership across a group of people -- or, worse, unclear ownership -- compounds the issue immensely. A whole bunch of people need to get together and decide which data should end up in the dustbin of history. In most cases, that's just not going to happen.
So why is our data growing so quickly? Because we're our own worst enemy. We do not manage our own data well. In general, we don't have systems in place to define retention policies for data at the time it's created, nor do we have clear ownership guidelines for that data. Eventually, that will have to change. But as with all things that take time, money, and a will to fix -- whether it's the data explosion or global warming -- nothing will happen until our backs are against the wall.
This story, "The high cost of lazy storage practices," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge's Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com.
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