Data Debri

Executive Summary on Data Debris

Data debris can be defined as information that was collected by a business once, but now no longer has any business value and could be disposed of. However, the IT department’s job is to collect and store information so they do not know how relevant each and every piece of data they collect is to the company. Therefore, in order to have a safety net in case the information is ever needed, they save everything. The irrelevant and unusable data within that collection is called data debris (Luellig, 2013). Some examples of data debris include short-term reference files that people usually forget to delete after completion of a project, orphaned files from old software that remain unused but are never deleted, outdated files that are most of the time duplicated for an advanced user technique but are never deleted, and outdated storage technology used for back up (EDRM, 2014). There are several challenges that data debris poses.

First of all, it hampers a business’s productivity. The time spent looking for information has been continuously increasing as IT stores more and more data. This significantly reduces the productivity level because the time spent looking for information could have been spent fulfilling other business needs (Byers, 2014). Secondly, a business is not aware of all the data that is being stored within its premises, paper and digital. Thus, it cannot confirm compliance with the regulations of the government (Byers, 2014). Thirdly, storage costs are a big challenge faced by businesses because technology is not improving as fast as a business’s storage needs are (Savitz, 2012).

Organizations like the Compliance, Governance, and Oversight Council (CGOC) are working on a defensive disposal program as a solution to this collected of data debris. The main issue is that the IT department is usually unaware of compliance, regulatory, and legal issues. CGOC is combining all of these aspects to ensure a standardized...