A survey by Symantec this past June revealed a significant gap between what managers say they want in terms of data retention and actual practices. In the survey, for example, 87 percent of respondents believe a retention policy should allow them to delete information without serious ramifications, mainly legal. However, less than 46 percent actually have an official retention plan.

Clearly there is a gap between what managers believe in regard to data retention and what they do, starting at the most basic level of having a data retention policy in the first place. In another example, just over half the respondents (51 percent) prohibit end-user (personal) archives. However, 65 percent report that end-users individually archive their data anyway.

Gaps or policy mismatches like these can lead to serious data retention mistakes that can have costly implications. wiredFINANCE has frequently argued that organizations simply keep too much data. The problem really comes down to a failure among business managers, legal, and IT to communicate around the issue of data retention.

One of the biggest mistakes is over-retention of data. The Symantec survey found that 75 percent of backups have infinite retention or what amounts to a permanent legal hold. Worse yet, 25 percent of backup data are not needed and shouldn’t be retained at all.

Part of the problem revolves around the misconception that data backup is a viable substitute for archiving. Data backup is intended to protect data for a certain period of time in the event of a system failure or data loss. After a few weeks or a few months at most, the backed up data is essentially useless. In the event of a problem, would you ever want to restore your systems with 6-month-old data?

Data you want to keep for long periods of time should be archived. There it can be stored in the most cost-effective way and efficiently found and accessed when needed. That’s not the case with backup.

Yet, according to the Symantec, 70 percent of respondents perform legal holds using backup and 25 percent preserve entire backup sets for legal holds on individual files and documents. That’s like preserving an entire lake although you might only need a couple of cups of water, and very specific cups of water at that.

Still, nearly half of the respondents use backup for archiving files and documents. They do it because they already have the backup software, but this is vastly inefficient. To access one of those files or documents you will have to restore the entire backup as a whole. An archive tool lets you go directly to the file you want.

Symantec used the survey to identify best and worst information management practices. Among the top-tier organizations, 71 percent have information retention plans and policies, compared to 27 percent among the lower tier. Even among the top tier, however, 26 percent use backup software for archiving and 20 percent use it for legal holds, which are poor practices. Among the lower tier it is even worse: 49 percent and 60 percent respectively.

The lack of a data retention policy and poor data retention practices are costly, resulting is high storage costs, excessive recovery times, and increased risk, especially when it comes to compliance matters and litigation. ###