Survey identifies high storage costs

Symantec has released the findings of its 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey, which highlights that a majority of enterprises are not following their own advice when it comes to information management.

More than 87% of respondents believe in the value of a formal information retention plan, but only 46% actually have one.

Survey results also found that too many enterprises save information indefinitely instead of implementing policies that allow them to confidently delete unimportant data or records, and suffer from rampant storage growth, unsustainable backup windows, increased litigation risk and expensive and inefficient discovery processes.

Most enterprises believe a proper information retention strategy should allow them to delete unnecessary information.

Enterprises are retaining far too much information where 75% of backup storage consists of infinite retention or legal hold backup sets. Respondents also stated that 25% of the data they backup is not needed for business or should not be kept in a backup.

Enterprises are misusing backup, recovery and archiving practices with 70% of enterprises using their backup software to implement legal holds and 25% to preserve the entire backup set indefinitely.

Nearly half the enterprises surveyed are improperly using their backup and recovery software for archiving. Additionally, while 51% prohibit employees from creating their own archives on their local machines and shared drives, 65% admit that employees routinely do so anyway.

Enterprises need to realise that backup is not an archive and it is not recommended to use backup for archiving and legal holds. Enterprises should retain a few weeks of backup (30 to 60 days) and then delete or archive data in an automated way thereafter, says the survey in some of its recommendations.

By using backup only for short-term and disaster recovery purposes, enterprises can backup and recover faster while deleting older backup sets within months instead of years. That's a huge amount of storage that can be confidently deleted or archived for long-term storage.

Enterprises should also develop and enforce information retention policies (what can and cannot be deleted, and when) automatically. Automated, policy-driven deletion creates less risk than ad hoc, manual deletion.

Use a full-featured archive system to make discovery as efficient as possible. Companies can then search for information more quickly - and with more granularity than they would in a backup environment.