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Yesterday I conducted a webinar for the Association of Legal Administrators titled Tomorrow’s Information Governance. One of the questions I received was about determining what is actually grey data, what should be kept and what is truly valueless data that should be disposed of. I thought it was a great question so I will address it here.

In recent months I have been struck by the explosion of high performance storage solutions - Nutanix, Pure Storage,  Nimble, Simplivity, and Datrium just to name a few.  These new storage solutions are pushing the performance envelope for the modern data center and virtual server hosts. What I find very interesting is the corresponding impact on actual storage expectations.

As corporate data continues to pile up within the enterprise, a much asked question, at least around the IT water cooler, is why is all of this data accumulating instead of being deleted. Employees create, send, and receive approximately 20 MB of data per day. The vast majority of this data is retained because employees feel that they will need to reuse/reference it at a later date so it accumulates on local storage, on file shares, in the email system and archive, and lately, into employee corporate and private clouds (figure1). In fact, 70 to 80% of corporate unstructured data is unindexed, unmanaged, and invisible to IT.

Organizations habitually over-retain information, especially unstructured electronic information, for many reasons. However, many organizations simply have not addressed what to do with this data so fall back on relying on individual employees to decide what should be kept and for how long and what should be disposed of. On the opposite end of the grey data management spectrum, a minority of organizations have tried centralized enterprise content management systems and have found them to be difficult to use. In these cases, employees find ways around these complex systems by keeping huge amounts of data locally on their workstations, on enterprise file shares, on removable media, in cloud accounts, or on rogue SharePoint sites that are used as “data dumps” with little or no records management or IT supervision. Much of this information is transitory, expired, or of questionable business value. Because of this lack of active management, information continues to accumulate. This information build-up raises the cost of storage as well as the risk associated with eDiscovery. In some cases the company’s General Counsel actively stops grey data “clean up” processes because they are afraid of being accused of destruction of evidence in a future case.

 It may surprise you to know that 10%, 20%, or even 30% of enterprise data can be classified as grey or inactive data, mainly from ex-employees, that has accumulated over the years as employees left the company. Many organizations simply haven’t defined policies around what to do with departing employee data. A minority of organizations will remove the hard disk from the departing employee’s laptop or desktop computer and place it in a cabinet for a year or longer. This policy is usually driven by the corporate legal department just in case the employee later files a wrongful termination lawsuit. This process is an attempt to address the issue but doesn’t really take into account the other possible data repositories where employee data can reside including file systems, email systems, email archives, removable media, or cloud repositories.