In the age of information and digitization, the volume of existing data is impossible to calculate. What we do know is that more and more is being created every day, and much of it ends up in oblivion. This is the so-called inactive data.
Although at first glance they may seem harmless and only take up space, a bad treatment can have many bad consequences. In this ZTalent blog post we will talk about its dangers and threats and give a solution for this problem.
What are the downsides of inactive data?
The disadvantages of inactive data in a company are many and varied. We summarize and group them into three main groups for a simpler and quicker understanding:
1- Impact on performance
The most valuable business benefits of data are the intelligence and deep insights it can provide to an organization. However, inactive data that is not needed for day-to-day business operations or that has been inherited, for example, from retired legacy systems, can degrade system performance.
This would result in longer analysis and processing times. In addition, if an organization is trying to move applications and data to the cloud, inactive data also increases the data footprint and migration times, which can lead to excess resources.
2- Increased costs
Keeping large amounts of data inactive has a serious impact on a company’s budget. Storage pricing models cover the storage technology itself, as well as staff costs and related processes such as backup management.
Typically, these costs have a direct correlation to the amount of data being stored and maintained. Thus, the more data, the more expensive the related storage costs. Therefore, a high amount of inactive data does nothing more than keep the wallet upside down. In other words, it’s just like throwing money down the drain.
3- Other risks
This category includes other types of inconveniences and threats to avoid. For example, if inactive data resides on a legacy platform, or in an unsupported application, it can lead to an increased risk of non-compliance, especially for heavily regulated industries such as banking or healthcare.
The solution: archive inactive data
Since total data deletion is not feasible, as it may retain potential value in the future, experts recommend that customers take advantage of the powerful capabilities of data archiving services. These enable an organization to securely manage the entire lifecycle of archived data, helping to simplify SAP operations, establish data retention policies or reduce the overall data footprint.
As they discuss on the SAPusers website, leveraging data archiving solutions can simplify the migration of SAP applications to the cloud by reducing the overall data footprint, helping to reduce migration requirements and ensure that data is better aligned with efficient IT operations once in production.
Properly archiving inactive data can also improve overall system performance and response times by streamlining transactions and reporting. End-user queries should also be faster and more accurate.
