The mountains of data in companies are constantly growing, and their CO₂ emissions are also increasing. More and more companies want to counteract this and decide to clean up their data to protect the climate.
Data mountains as a climate killer
And mountains of data are growing every day – that’s probably how you can sum up the current situation in many companies. That in itself is not a bad thing. Because: many files are important for daily business, other files can/may become important at some point, and with the right analysis an incredible amount of knowledge can be extracted from the ( raw ) data, which can move the company forward. However, this requires an understanding of what data is actually available and where it can be found, what tools can be used to evaluate it and, crucially, which data is useful and which on the other hand is under development. good hands at nirvana. Also, there’s no point in maintaining the same data twice and three times – from a known
Backup by the 3-2-1 rule aside. No one wants chaos in the data. In fact, it’s even harmful.
After all, it takes power to store data – and the more data there is, the more power it consumes. This is a problem, especially for those companies that are aware of sustainability and their ecological footprint. And their numbers are also growing every day.
As a new study by software company Aparavi shows, the problem often starts with the fact that 21% of IT managers surveyed don’t know exactly how much data is available in their company. A third of those surveyed were also unable to name the specific costs associated with storing available data. Accordingly, there is a significant lack of understanding of the significant and growing cost factor .
Of course, this is not true for all companies or all IT managers. Most may well be data volumes and costs .estimate. Thirty-one percent of respondents indicated that their data occupies between 1,001 and 5,000 terabytes of disk space; 27 percent even have more than 5,000 terabytes. As for costs: 40 percent of companies spend up to 100,000 euros on data storage in a fiscal year; for 27 percent, the costs are even higher.
Cleansing data to protect the climate
According to the study, it is also a fact that 49 percent of the companies surveyed consider the social and ecological consequences of their activities important. They therefore record them in a sustainability report or in a so-called ESG report (the acronym stands for Environmental, Social and Governance). Numerous other studies have found this over and over again: awareness of sustainability is growing; many companies want their carbon footprint to be as small as possible.
And it is for this reason that they have discovered not only green IT , but also the importance of cleaning up data to protect the climate . The calculation is simple: less data = less energy consumption = less CO2. The sheer volume of data is particularly noticeable when company data is moved to the cloud; therefore, this process is often accompanied by a thorough data cleansing. The result: the required storage space is reduced, and with it the energy consumption.
Data strategy helps against useless data mountains
The question is how to grasp mountains of data in general and useless data in particular. An effective data strategy is often a panacea . The first step in such a strategy is to get an overview of the company’s data landscape and a qualitative assessment of existing data. Data cleansing (to protect the climate) and data deletion are also recommended . But be careful: this data deletion must be done in accordance with GDPR! This sets the stage.
Continued by the fact that companies have a strategic vision and implementation plan. In addition, one should always consider tactical data management strategies that deal with data acquisition, data validation, data protection, as well as data cleansing. Building on this, the third step is to consider how data can be used through a modern data architecture so that maximum business value can be achieved.
Protect the climate with data cleansing
An effective data strategy stops useless data being archived, and data centers are losing their bad reputation as veritable data graves into which huge amounts of information garbage are dumped. It is said that in 2020 alone, 5.8 million tons of carbon dioxide were emitted into the atmosphere because of useless data storage.