Size doesn’t matter, it’s how you manage what you’ve got that counts

By Stuart Beattie | August 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Information overload, data explosion and big data – terms we are now reading about on a daily basis. It’s no secret that the amount of information that businesses are dealing with today is huge, so huge in fact that the actual size is still difficult to grasp. But what does this mean to businesses today and should they be concerned?

Our recent State of Information survey found that an unimaginable 2.2 Zettabytes of information is stored by businesses. To try and put this in context, imagine filling the Empire State building with one page documents – 1,287 times – or getting every grain of sand in the world and multiplying the amount by 300.

And it’s continuing to skyrocket. In fact, over the next year information is expected to grow 67% for enterprises and 178% for SMEs. Yet for most businesses, storing all this data isn’t a concern anymore as it’s easy to increase storage space in the cloud. However, where businesses are still falling short is when it comes to effectively managing and securing all this data. The reality is that bad management is either leading organisations to spend far more than necessary on storing and protecting their information or worse ignoring the problem and not doing either.

A key issue that has been identified is information sprawl – the overwhelming growth of unstructured information that is disorganised, difficult to access and often duplicated elsewhere. Companies believe that nearly half (42%) of their information is duplicated, meaning they are paying to store and manage much more information than they need to.

Information is core to businesses and it’s vital that they get up to speed and understand and classify the data that they need to hold on to so that they end up with a realistic amount to manage and secure. Not all information is equal and businesses need to separate useless data from valuable business information; making sure this is protected accordingly and any unwanted data is deleted.

Managing information well will not only improve efficiency and security but will in turn reduce costs.

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