Organisations are creating so much data that some do not know how much they have or how quickly it is growing, according to Actifio.
A/NZ regional manager, Budd Ilic, said about one in three businesses were in this situation.
“A lot of CIOs are saying that it’s growing so quickly it’s hard to contain it,” he said.
“The majority of the time they don’t realise what is causing that growth.”
Data is typically growing at 30 to 40 per cent year-on-year, and Ilic said it is proliferating exponentially.
“Once you look under the covers, it’s not so much the raw data that is causing this growth,” he said.
Instead, Ilic said it is copies of data from continuity, disaster recovery and analytics solutions.
Once the data is created, some organisations have a tendency to make 10 or more copies of that data.
The big issue
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IDC estimates 60 per cent of what is stored in datacentres is "copy data," raising concerns about whether businesses are aware of the duplicates.
Ilic said most organisations know there is a problem, but they are not entirely sure what constitutes duplicate data.
“Very few companies have sat down and done an analysis of what the large volume of data really looks like, where it is located, how quickly it is growing, and how many copies there are,” he said.
Identifying how much of the data is the same content being copied over and over is also challenging.
Because storage is become cheaper, Ilic said few businesses are making the effort to cut down on duplicates.
“It’s often easier to throw more disk at the problem than get to the root cause, which is the source of proliferation of all these data copies,” he said.
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.
