Veritas Announces First-of-its-Kind Data Genomics Index
Veritas Technologies has announced a new research initiative focussed on uncovering the truth behind the data that organisations store.
The Veritas Data Genomics Index 2016 is a first-of-its-kind benchmark analysis of data stored within a typical enterprise environment. It reveals insights into data growth, age, size and type, thereby providing organisations with the comparison standard for beginning to take action on their data.
It is hoped that this real-time view of today’s corporate data will jumpstart initiatives to act intelligently about stored data and devote remediation efforts where they will get the best return. For example, the study reveals that over 40% of files have remained untouched for three years, creating an opportunity for businesses to positively impact their bottom line costs.
The inaugural Data Genomics Index leverages data collected from Veritas’ worldwide customer base of over 50,000 enterprise organisations, gained from analytics of tens of billions of files and their attributes.
Key Findings
Among the key findings from the report is the fact that images,
developer files and compressed files take up almost one third of the total environment. Developer files represented 20% of the total number count, while, when examining trends over the past 10 years, it was noted that presentations as a stored file type have declined by 500%.
In addition to this, the autumn months seem to be the time, generally speaking, when businesses are most active in creating files. There are as many as 91% more text files, 48% more spreadsheets and 89% more geographic and information system files. Organisations also apparently do most of their videography in summer and autumn, and then save it to company disk. Video files also seem to increase by 68% in autumn.
The report also found that orphaned data, which is data without an attributed owner, either through role changes or employee departures, is costing organisations. Orphaned data tends to be content rich file types like videos, images and presentations. Letting this data drift without ownership is risky for organisations and it is also allowing it to take up more than its fair share of disk space based on file count distribution.
Insights such as these enable organisations to prioritise areas to achieve significant returns. Traditional ‘office’ formats like presentations, spreadsheets and documents take up more stale space than they should, costing organisations unnecessarily. Archiving, deletion or migration efforts are best spent on visual format files like videos and images.
Change the Crippling Growth Dynamic
Steve Vranyes, CTO at Veritas, said: “One thing we hear all the time from our customers is they’re struggling with two competing forces of nature – the exponential data growth curve, and the restriction of resources and budget to fight it with new servers and applications.
“By aggregating Veritas’ unique understanding of key metadata characteristics we can surface an accurate representation of the average data environment. These insights will change the crippling growth dynamic enterprises are faced with today.”
The Data Genomics Project
Veritas’ Data Genomics Index is the first contribution to the Data Genomics Project, a first-of-its kind research initiative to help organisations understand the true nature of the unstructured data that they create, store and manage on a daily basis. The vendor, as a founding member, will remain a contributor to the project but it will be commercially separate from the business.
The Project will provide a community and forum for this research and discussion, made up of data scientists, industry experts and thought leaders. Together they aim to further build the data genome for information management, and share their findings with organisations worldwide who are struggling to solve tremendous data growth challenges.
»Click here to download the Data Genomics Index 2016»