The result is that, by some estimates, as much as 80% of the information businesses and their employees have is outdated or useless. Information governance professionals have a term for this: ROT (redundant, obsolete, trivial).
As much as 80% of the information businesses and their employees have is outdated or useless.
There's a myth that companies that aren't subject to industry-specific regulations are immune from liability for keeping old data on hand, but nearly every organisation is regulated these days. Under the General Data Protection Act in Europe, similar legislation in the US, and privacy restrictions being enacted in more than 120 countries around the world, keeping data longer than it's needed is a risk to any organisation.
Regulation is just one of several reasons to clean out your hard drive. The most well-defended corporate databases can't protect against a malware attack on a home PC or information unintentionally left in the open on a cloud server. The more data a company collects, the bigger the attack surface.
The more data a company collects, the bigger the attack surface.
"Why spend money to protect data you don't need and why keep it someplace a hacker can take advantage of?" said Sue Trombley, managing director of thought leadership at data and records management giant Iron Mountain. Ransomware doesn't distinguish between good and bad data, and no one wants to pay to recover something that shouldn't have been there in the first place.