Do you think a gigabyte is a lot of data? How about a terabyte or petabyte? How many of you reading this blog have purchased extra storage for your home computers, just so you can keep all that stuff around a little longer?

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We are information hoarders!!! By Mark Grysiuk, CIP, ermm
and Irene Gelyk, CRM, CIP, ermm
ARMA Toronto Chapter Newsletter, Spring 2012
Do you think a gigabyte is a lot of data? How about a terabyte or petabyte? How many of you reading this blog have purchased
extra storage for your home computers, just so you can keep all that stuff around a little longer?
In your work environment, if you have to make a business decision using some of that data, how are you going to find it? Do you
know what’s on those discs, and if you don’t, what strategies do you have in place to mitigate risks associated with all that infor-
mation? Those risks include spending more than 35% of your time looking for something, or the liability of having inaccurate in-
formation, and for a corporation, those problems can be millions of dollars in productivity loss or court liability.
In a recent CGOC (Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council) Benchmark Report on Information Governance, "98% of re-
spondents agree rigorous discovery and defensible disposal of information is a desired benefit and requisite outcome of informa-
tion governance efforts yet 78% were unable to dispose of data today."
Yet, by our own design, we are information hoarders. “Storage is cheap,” we say.
But it’s not cheap.
Have you considered what it costs your organization to manage the astronomical amounts of information, not knowing whether it
is truly useful to us or not, often referred to as TCO (total cost of ownership) Blake Richardson, author of Records and Information
Management 2.0 for Dummies, writes “that the price of storage represents less than 15 percent of the TCO.” So if 85% of TOC is
related to everything else, how much are we really paying to manage the growing volumes of data, if,
 One gigabyte is 4,473 200-page books
 One terabyte equals:
 About 1,000 gigabytes
 About 50,000 trees made into paper and then printed
 About a 200 mile high stack of paper, which you can compare to the international space station orbiting 250 miles above
the earth!
 Ten terabytes equals the entire printed collection at the U.S. Library of Congress
 Fifty terabytes is the typical content of a large mass storage system
 One petabyte is a million gigabytes
 Two petabytes is estimated to be the information within all US academic research libraries
 Two hundred petabytes is the equivalent of all printed material…….. on the globe!
Do you get the picture? If you haven’t done so already, start incorporating data governance practices into your day-to-day routine
by scheduling time to remove ROT (Redundant, Outdated Trivial) information. Yes, it’s a little work to adjust to the new routine.
But once the routine is set in motion, you’ll be much further ahead than all your competitors.
Sources:
 http://www.straitassoc.com/2012/02/dont-look-now-your-data-is-on-the-rise/
 Records and Information Management 2.0 for Dummies, by Blake Richardson
 Both Mark (Corporate Security Governance Specialist) and Irene (Team Lead, Corporate Security Governance) work for a
leading Canadian technology company with offices globally).