Extract from H5’s article “Heads Up: COVID-19 Disruptions Can Add to Data Woes”
Disrupted data environments may lead to unwanted data accumulation
As the COVID-19 pandemic displaced employees from office buildings to living rooms, the corporate data landscape began an inevitable metamorphosis. An array of communications channels (think Zoom and Slack) has proliferated to enable continued collaboration. Data has been rerouted. New data sources have been created or accessed. Workflows have been revised.
Nearly a year into the pandemic, many organizations still confront a hodge-podge of official and unofficial remote applications that will undoubtedly add to the growing accumulation of corporate data stockpiles, assuming, of course, that companies can corral it in the first place. Some of it may be critical to operations and will need to be retained and managed. Much of it, however, will likely be redundant, obsolete, and trivial data, colloquially known as ROT, which presents an ongoing challenge for most organizations today.
Accumulating ROT
ROT takes both an obvious and subtle toll. According to the Compliance Governance and Oversight Council’s (CGOC) 2018 Information Governance Benchmark Survey, 60% of the volume of enterprise data then had no business, legal, or regulatory value — a number which is bound to be on the rise, given current circumstances.
