1.3 billion gigabytes or the equivalent of 1.3 billion high-definition DVDs. It is the gigantic weight of cold data that companies generate every day in the world.
This cold data, also called “black data” or even “dark data”, “forgotten data”, constitutes all data collected by companies that is rarely or never consulted and used by companies.
They are generated by the daily interactions of users, employees, customers, external service providers. They encompass both technical data (server log files), but also geolocation data, emails and attachments, data from former employees, presentations, financial results, customer call recordings, etc.
And the increasing use of connected objects (IOT) leads at the same time to a massive production of this cold data.
52% of data stored worldwide
In general, they would represent at least 52% of the data stored in the world, for a company this can be counted in millions or even billions of files. Companies that cannot quantify the volume of data at rest compared to exploitable and exploited data.
This data sleeping on their servers or third party data centers (data center) also costs them money. First they clutter up storage space (increasing the company’s storage bill) and consume free energy.
According to a study by “Le GreenIT”, this data represents up to 14% of the digital environmental footprint in France, that is to say 2.3 million tons of CO2 emitted, figures that, however, are very difficult to verify, but one thing is for sure: they tend to increase exponentially every year.
2 billion euros per month
In the financial aspect, they would cost 2,000 million euros each month. companies on a global scale according to a study by the American firm IDC.
However, the question still does not seem to mobilize companies and their management.
Companies are “afraid” of deleting data
In addition, the law obliges companies to delete certain data. Therefore, personal data cannot be kept indefinitely: the data controller must determine a retention period in accordance with the purpose that motivated the collection of this data. This principle of limited retention of personal data is provided for by the GDPR and the Data Protection Law.
Problem, “file policies are usually heterogeneous and in the end we don’t know where the data is, especially in SMEs with few resources. The smaller the company, the more it accumulates. A bit like the general public that reproduces their paper habits with data. The first problem is, therefore, access”, underlines the specialist.
So, it comes down to classifying between cold data that should stay cold, exploitable cold data, and cold data that will be permanently deleted.
And highlight various actions: “rethink the archive, establish purification policies in compliance with standards, establish the means of exploitation, all in a carbon accounting logic”.
Source: BFM TV
