A majority (79%) of IT decision makers in Singapore admit to being digital hoarders which could pose serious financial, security and data management risks to organizations, according to the Data Hoarders research released by Veritas Technologies.
Following its Data Genomics project that analyzed tens of billions of files and their attributes from many of its customers’ unstructured data environments, Veritas conducted a study to analyze the data storage habits of ITDMs and global office professionals.
The research, commissioned by Veritas, was conducted among 10,022 global office professionals and ITDMs with 1000 respondents from Singapore to look into how individuals manage data.
Significant concerns regarding data hoarding were highlighted, with 82 percent 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.
The Digital Hoarding Struggle is Real
The findings highlighted that digital hoarding ITDMs keep 52 percent of all the data they create. They also concede that the oldest files on their computers are six years old, on average.
While this indicates that data hoarding behavior is common across organizations, many office professionals, 57 percent, admit that they wouldn’t trust a data hoarder to turn in a project on time, higher than the global average at 48 percent. And nearly one in three (32 percent) digital hoarding office professionals have never followed through on a plan to delete old files. 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. Close to half (45 percent) would rather get rid of all their clothes than their digital files while 37 percent would rather work weekends for three months than get rid of all their digital files.
Employees Overwhelmed by the Deluge of Data
A significant majority of ITDMs were overwhelmed by the extent and amount of data that they are hoarding. However, while 76 percent of ITDMs feel that digital hoarding is one of the biggest IT problems at their company – 86 percent feel that non-IT executives don’t understand how big of a problem it can be.
More than three quarters (77 percent) of ITDMs frequently have to take time away from their daily responsibilities at work to solve problems caused by digital hoarding – and on average, they encounter 4 issues per week. On average, ITDMs feel that 44 percent of the employees at their company are digital hoarders, whereas 70 percent of office professionals self-identify as digital hoarders. What is clear is that employees struggle to determine if data has long-term importance or value. As a result, 47 percent of them are afraid they’ll eventually need to refer to the data again and they aren’t sure which files should be kept or deleted.
ITDMs Admit to Storing Items that could be Harmful to the Company
The amount of data their company stores would increase the time it takes to respond to a data breach, according to 83 percent of ITDMs. Moreover, what is being retained could itself be harmful, with 73 percent of office professionals and 91 percent of ITDMs in Singapore admitting they save ’harmful’ files – which is significantly more than office professionals (62 percent) and ITDMs globally (83 percent). These include: unencrypted personnel records, job applications to other companies, unencryptedcompany secrets and embarrassing employee correspondence.
Personal files also make up quite a bit of the ‘junk’ saved, with 91 percent of ITDMs admitting to saving unnecessary personal files.
Data Hoarding Behavior could mean GDPR Compliance Failure
In May 2018, the European Parliament will implement the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a set of EU- wide laws designed to harmonize data protection across the region. Both EU-based companies and those outside doing business within it are affected.
With a focus on protecting EU citizens and their data from misuse and lax data security, the consequences for non-compliance are potentially huge. Maximum non-compliance fines are the higher of $22.3 million USD (€20 million) or up to four percent of worldwide turnover.
“As Singapore moves towards becoming a digital society, virtually every organization struggles with the challenges brought on by the exponential data growth. As a result, office professionals and IT departments have the tendency to safeguard all the information on hand for ‘potential’ use in the future,” said Victor Cheng, Managing Director, Asia South Region, Veritas.
“To make matters worse, employees do not view data hoarding as a threat, thus placing data clean-up on the low priority list. It’s time to make data clean-up a priority while causing minimal disruption within the organization in order to prevent breaches in the future.”
This research was conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Veritas Technologies across 13 countries and more than 10,000 office professionals and ITDMs.