Data Management Glossary
Sustainable Data Management
What is Sustainable Data Management?
Sustainable data management refers to the practice of collecting, storing, and using data in a way that is environmentally friendly, economically feasible, and socially responsible. This involves reducing the carbon footprint of data centers, leveraging renewable energy sources, and following ethical principles in the collection, storage, and use of data (regardless of source, structure or location). It also involves implementing data management strategies that ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of valuable data, while reducing waste and avoiding data hoarding. The goal of sustainable data management is to balance the economic, environmental, and social impacts of data operations and ensure that data is managed in a way that supports the well-being of both current and future generations
In an an article for Sustainability magazine, Komprise co-founder and COO Krishna Subramanian noted:
Most organizations have hundreds of terabytes of data, if not petabytes, which can be managed more efficiently and even deleted but are hidden and/or not understood well enough to manage appropriately. In most businesses, 70% of the cost of data is not in storage but in data protection and management. Creating multiple backup and DR copies of rarely used cold data is inefficient and costly, not to mention its environmental impact. Furthermore, storing obsolete “zombie data” on expensive on-premises hardware (or even, cloud file storage, which is the highest cost tier for cloud storage), doesn’t make sage economic sense and consumes the most energy resources.
She summarized the steps to sustainable unstructured data management as:
- Understand your unstructured data (analyze your unstructured data)
- Automate data actions by policy (data management policy)
- Work with data owners and key stakeholders (getting departments to care about data storage savings)
Her sustainable data management conclusion:
Sustainable data center and data management practices are no longer nice to have – but in many respects, a need to have. The world is storing too much data and without smart strategies for managing it, the price is becoming too high: significantly higher IT infrastructure costs, lack of opportunity to participate in government incentives, potential customer attrition, and long-term potential brand damage by ignoring the sustainability movement.
Read the full article here.
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