According to the Gartner Group, the largest single source of waste in handling data is unstructured files stored by your staff on servers, local computers, and public file storage systems like DropBox, GoogleDocs, or OneDrive. This unstructured data chokes the digital productivity of your company.

Some facts;

  • Data is growing at 40% per year.   The typical small business has about 1 terabyte (1 trillion bytes) of data. In 4 years, that will triple to 3 terabytes.
  • Most data (about 80%) is unstructured.

 

So what’s the big deal?   You can buy 3 terabytes of storage for cheap, right?

Yes, but, as data size grows, productivity lags. Just like many other parts of your business:

Clutter = loss of productivity.

For example, your entire accounting, administration, and production data will be about 250 Gigabytes. But the other 75% of your data is an accumulation of unstructured data.

This costs you lots of money.    

Why? Two Reasons.

One miscalculation is that storage is essentially free.   A terabyte (1,000,000,000,000 Bytes) would cost you $10,000 10 years ago. Today it’s $50.     The public storage sites seduce us with large amounts of ‘free’ storage.

The first reason – as data accumulates, the human cost goes up.   To find and locate the latest contract version for a customer, the packing slip for the shipment that didn’t make it to the customer, the name of the vendor’s QC manager…are all getting slower because there is so much data to wade through.

So why not just buy a faster computer?

Unfortunately, if data is unstructured and unmanaged you still won’t easily find it no matter how fast your computer is.

The second cost driver is backup and disaster recovery.

Each piece of unstructured and/or unneeded data – will be backed up, stored, and maintained in your disaster recovery systems. Unlike storage costs, these costs do increase dramatically as data grows. The software required to manage the enormous amounts of data are increasing in costs and as the complexity increases so too do the labor costs.   And it takes 4-8 times your entire data store to manage a capable backup system and it’s not cheap to move all that data around.

So not only does it slow down your employees, it is increasing the cost of your IT every day.

Upward has exciting solutions to some of these problems from ViaWorks & SharePoint 2013. We can help you to put a lid on these problems.   Watch these blogs for more information soon.

Or visit our website to learn more about what we do to help our customers