Veritas Research Shows Trend Towards Digital Hoarding

Veritas research reveals that 82% of IT decision makers admit to being digital hoarders which pose serious financial, security and data management risks to organisations.

Veritas Technologies, the leader in information management, has released the Data Hoarders research study showing that 82% of IT decision makers admit they are hoarders of data and digital files. Following its Data Genomics project that analysed tens of billions of files and their attributes from many of its customers’ unstructured data environments, Veritas conducted a study to analyse the data storage habits of IT decision makers and global office professionals.

The research, commissioned by Veritas, was conducted among 10,022 global office professionals and IT decision makers to look into how individuals manage data. Significant concerns regarding data hoarding were highlighted, with 73%of all respondents indicating that they store data that could be potentially harmful to their organizations. These include: unencrypted personal records, job applications to other companies, unencrypted company secrets and embarrassing employee correspondence.

Major issues highlighted in the research include:

The Digital Hoarding Struggle is Real
The findings highlighted that IT decision makers are hoarding their digital files and saving 54 percent of all the data they create. In addition, 41 percent of all digital files created go unmodified for three or more years. While this indicates that data hoarding behaviour is common across organizations, many office professionals, 48 percent, admit that they wouldn’t trust a data hoarder to turn in a project on time. Respondents are also willing to do the unexpected in order to keep the files they’ve hoarded, giving up their clothes and weekends rather than deleting their files. Almost half, 45 percent, would rather work weekends for three months than get rid of all of their digital files. Meanwhile, 46 percent would rather throw out all of their clothes than all of their digital files.