Secondary data is draining your budget and putting you at risk of fines, says iomart

John Burrowes MBCS, business strategy consultant, iomart, warned the audience at Computing's Cloud & Infrastructure Live conference that they must get on top of their data

There are many copies of most organisations' data floating around various internal and external envioronments, leading to hugely increased costs, inefficiencies, and potential regulatory fines.

That's the opinion of John Burrowes MBCS, business strategy consultancy and iomart, speaking at today's Cloud and Infrastructure Live! conference in Central London.

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Burrowes explained that pre-virtualisation data centres were full of servers running a single applications each.

"Now we have agile data centres, and workloads and applications moving into the public cloud. So that consolidation is starting to break up, as data is moving to lots of different areas," said Burrowes.

He referenced a recent study carried out across 900 organisations with annual revenues of $10 billion or more, and stated that 87 per cent of respondents identified that this data fragmentation will be nearly impossible to manage in the future.

"People recognise it as a challenge, but they don't know how they're going to meet it," he said.

He then asked for a show of hands from the audience, which revealed that not a single IT professional in the room could claim to know precisely how many copies of their data exists in the world.

"63 per cent of organisations surveyed said they have between four and 15 copies of the same data in their own environments. The cost of managing that amount of data is high, and with data growth it's only going to get worse," said Burrowes.

Continuing to reference the study, he said that 91 per cent of organisations are concerned about the level of visibility the IT team has into secondary data across all sites.

"That's a concern for compliance. If you don't know where your data is, it's almost impossible to be compliant."

Burrowes concluded by saying taht 54 per cent of organisations felt that they'd blow their entire IT budget in attempting to tackle this problem, but he stated that it doesn't have to be so expensive, and more efficient storage and use of data leads to increased revenues, which can pay for the new tooling and processes required.

Earlier at the event, a legal expert from Pinsent Masons explained what both customers and providers of cloud services need to know in order to remain compliant with GDPR.