As already briefly touched upon in the September newsletter, the unrestrained storage of data without a corresponding strategy is still a fact of life in many companies. We held a well-attended Beertalk on Data Cleanup last Monday, October 24. It can be assumed that up to 80% of all data in the company is either outdated or no longer current, and may even be dangerous, and that both its origin and quality are at least unclear. The KRM now offers a data cleanup service. The Data Cleanup Service from KRM takes care of enterprise data assets and ensures that overall IT costs are reduced and risks are minimized. All data always has an expiration date, even if this is often indefinite in the future (based on a predefined “event based trigger”). Life cycle management for data ensures that an expiration date is defined when the data is created, so that at the end of its life, expired data can be deleted as automatically as possible. Because: Only those who can delete data are in control of it!

At KRM, Daniel Spichty looks after customers who are confronted with data overload and are looking for ways out. Regarding the Data Cleanup, he says: “The “store everything forever” mentality (1) is no longer an option for companies, a culture change is needed! The true cost of maintaining and handling the mountains of data is hidden and huge. While the hard costs for the IT storage infrastructure are largely known, the soft costs, especially in the area of compliance and legal conformity (e.g., e-discovery, data protection), are unknown. Our Data Cleanup shows the total cost of data, implements life-cycle management for data (with appropriate policies), and cleans up old data assets. We see again and again that not even for archive systems the destruction of data can happen automatically. This, mind you, is for systems where the retention period is of central importance and destruction should be possible at the push of a button. This is frightening! Automated deletion of expired data outside the archives (network drives, SharePoint repositories, email repositories) is then completely non-existent. Our Data Cleanup Service ensures that data that is no longer needed can be deleted in the most automated and legally secure way possible. This saves costs and makes companies fit for digital transformation.”

More about the Data Cleanup Service on the KRM website: http://informationgovernance.ch/angebote/cleanup/

(1) “nearly 80% of respondents cite a keep everything culture as a key impediment to implementation (of a records mgmt program)”, AIIM-Cohasset: 2013 | 2014 INFORMATION GOVERNANCE BENCHMARKING SURVEY, p.8.