Simon Jelley, General Manager for SaaS Protection, Endpoint and Backup Exec at Veritas Technologies.
Consider for a moment your forecasted 2023 annual revenue. Now imagine half of it disappearing into thin air. What impact would that have on your business? My guess is that it would be quite severe. In fact, if that were to happen, you might not even have a business to worry about anymore come 2024.
But that’s just how many of your customers say they’re willing to walk away from you for knowingly causing environmental damage by failing to control how much unnecessary data you’re storing. More precisely, 47% of your customers are willing to put their money where their mouths are, according to recent research by my company on consumer sentiment toward the environmental impact of poor data management practices.
And you’re probably storing a lot of unnecessary data. Reports suggest that up to 73% of enterprise data goes unused for strategic purposes. And your customers aren’t happy about this—51% say this concerns them.
Why such a strong reaction from consumers?
It’s no secret that the mostly fossil fuel-powered data centers where all that unnecessary data is stored are a significant source of CO2. In fact, data centers account for around 2% of all global carbon emissions, about the same as the entire airline industry. If you’re not convinced that’s significant, know that 47% of your customers consider it significant enough to concern them.
In response, almost 60% of consumers say they want to see more focus from organizations on controlling the negative environmental impact of data storage. So, in the interest of preserving your business by preserving the environment, here are three data management best practices to consider.
1. Continually classify and categorize your data. The idea here is that you can’t properly manage data, and by extension the environmental impact it has, if you don’t know what it is or where it is (i.e., dark data). This involves finding or creating a system to identify, define label and group your data that works best for your business.
2. Frequently archive or delete obsolete and trivial data. As indicated above, the average organization is hoarding an incredible amount of data it knows is not necessary. Eliminating this data can not only help the environment but also reduce storage costs, increase security against threats like ransomware and reduce regulatory risks associated with data governance and compliance.
3. Deduplicate regularly to get rid of redundant data. Deduplication is the process of eliminating unnecessary copies of existing data. Redundancy is a good thing when done right (see the 3-2-1-1 rule I’ve described before), but too much non-strategic redundancy—a common problem in most organizations—is bad for both your budget and the environment.
Though necessary for many reasons, only one of which is reducing your businesses’ carbon footprint, these three steps can be complicated, especially in larger organizations where the amount of new data generated and stored on a daily basis can reach into the terabytes of information. One way to tackle them is to implement a consolidated data management platform that can automate many of the processes involved. Some even use artificial intelligence to take the processes from automated to autonomous. Otherwise, start by conducting a manual initial audit of your data and go from there. And remember, it’s not a one-time process, but must be a continual effort.
Bonus recommendation: Choose your cloud storage providers carefully. Data from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that storing a petabyte of unoptimized backup data in the cloud for a year could create as much as 3.5 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Selecting cloud providers that have the same high environmental sustainability standards that your business does and then extending your data management platform to your multi-cloud infrastructure to further optimize your cloud-based data is another key step in reducing your data’s carbon footprint.
In closing, allow me to quote my colleague Rags Srinivasan: “The risk for both businesses and the environment of not identifying and eliminating unneeded data is too great to ignore any longer.” Follow the steps I’ve outlined here to help keep your business from becoming the latest victim of the climate crisis.
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