The NY Times’ Shelly Podolny ran a recent opinion piece on the growth of information. Particularly troublesome was the cost of information overload which was estimated to be in the “…hundreds of millions of dollars yearly.” According to the NY Times:
The current volume estimate of all electronic information is roughly 1.2 zettabytes, the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on Twitter continuously for a century… More stunning: 75 percent of the information is duplicative. By 2020, experts estimate that the volume will be 44 times greater than it was in 2009.
And it is in the business world where all of this data is continuously being stockpiled – mainly because doing so seems easier than figuring out what is permissible to delete. There are other costs associated to information hoarding as well, costs like e-discovery which can add up to millions of dollars every year on top of settlements due to it’s prohibitively expensive nature.
As internet usage expands in volume, this problem faces both Wall Street and Main Street:
…it’s not the giants like Google or Amazon or Wall Street investment banks that are responsible for creating the data load on those servers — it’s us. Seventy percent of the digital universe is generated by individuals as we browse, share, and entertain ourselves…
Podolny asserts that no matter what we do, “…improvements in the digital highway usually just lead to more traffic…” But here at ZL we believe that is a fallacy. ZL believes in smarter traffic.
By reducing duplicative information within organizations, storage footprints can be reduced by over 75 percent. Using proven methods like stubbing, single-instancing and SaaS, we believe in a further reduction of IT capital expenditures while preventing the hidden costs of rogue data.
On top of this, ZL can categorize and (most importantly) delete data based upon the content or metadata. This puts real teeth to a retention schedule and means that there is even less information being stored.
Less processing power storing less information means smaller server farms, reduced energy consumption, and a decrease in a corporation’s carbon footprint.
As Podolny asserts, “No one wants to give up the pleasures and benefits that the digital domain provides.” With smart information management, no one will.
