Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/45522
JIM MCGANN INDEX ENGINES Warning: Hoard Data at Your Own Risk I 54 nformation technology owns data and legal owns policies, but when they aren't working together, who owns the mess? Corporations have a serious hoarding problem. Data is being hoarded at unprecedented rates: billions of email messages comprised of valuable intellectual property, copies of contracts under litigation, C-level internal messaging and literally mountains of documents and miles of spreadsheets. A typical corporate data center has thousands of terabytes, even petabytes, of user data. Add to this the fact that multiple copies of everything are being saved and dispersed throughout multiple locations and, suddenly, the hoarding of data increases exponentially. Risky Business ILTA White Paper If there are lessons regarding the risks of data hoarding to be gleaned from the recent The News of the World scandal, at least one of them is that there is a widespread misunderstanding at the enterprise level regarding the nature of data. In the context of the enterprise, we are all data makers tapping away on data-collecting devices. The enterprise, if the time should come, can expunge the data maker and devices, but never the data. A DEFAULT PRACTICE BEGINS Hoarding is running rampant in IT. It is not because IT professionals have some strange obsessive-compulsive