Data Disposition Must Be A Priority
Posted by
Andrew Conry Murray
June 07, 2008
While the oil and gas refined by CVR Energy will someday run out, the company generates a seemingly inexhaustible supply of data: 3 to 5 TB of information in 2008 alone, says CIO and senior VP Mike Brooks. He expects that load to double every year for the foreseeable future.
Though disk may still be cheap, Brooks says, it just doesn't make financial sense for CVR to store every bit of electronic information indefinitely. Besides raising hardware, software, and utilities costs, outsized data stores make backups and enterprise search less efficient, and legal e-discovery more burdensome. When you're paying lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to review e-mail and documents, a smaller pile means a smaller bill.
That's why CVR, a $3 billion-a-year refinery based in Sugar Land, Texas, is undertaking a massive data disposition project, hammering out policies that will govern how long the company stores its information and when it can be disposed. Between deletions based on the new rules and other technology approaches, such as deduplication, Brooks hopes to cut CVR Energy's disk use in half.
He isn't alone. More organizations are evaluating--if not yet implementing--data disposition strategies. By 2013, half of all Global 2000 companies will have formal records management systems to shepherd data through its life cycle, Gartner estimates.
