Once in a while, we’ve all felt the need for a spring clean of stuff. This fact holds true for data that businesses have on customers.

In this digital age where information proliferates across various online channels, it is important to be mindful of how data is used and stored, as it can have serious implications. 

Which is why, getting rid of clutter can feel good and save huge storage costs, especially where data is concerned. 

Pave the way for Data Protection

As GDPR compliance looms large on the horizon, businesses must steer clear of hoarding irrelevant data. Data minimisation, a key GDPR principle will serve as an important measure for facilitating data protection by design and default. The regulation defines data minimisation as ‘adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed.’

Take the example of our retail customer who experienced a major space crunch on its enterprise data platform. As a strategic IT partner, we investigated the cause of the storage loss in order to implement measures for freeing up space on the platform.

Upon interviewing a cross section of business and IT stakeholders, we discovered that a lot of data was unnecessarily hoarded. Key findings of the investigation included:

• Unspecified data owners, resulting in orphan data within the system
• Regulatory concerns leading to data hoarding
• Departmental silos resulting in multiple copies for different reporting requirements