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Dark Data to Waste Up to 5.8m Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide this Year

Massive sprawls of dark data pollute data centers worldwide; deleting data waste could help to reduce the carbon footprint of digitalisation

21 April 2020 –  Digitisation can be part of the solution to climate change but storing digital data that is never used can also consume an enormous amount of energy and, as a result, produce CO2 that need never have been wasted. Veritas estimates that 5.8 million tonnes[1] of CO2 will be unnecessarily pumped into the atmosphere as a result of powering the storage of this kind of data this year alone.  In order to protect the planet from this waste, businesses need to get on top of their data management strategies, use the right tools to identify which data is valuable, and rid their data centres of ‘dark data’.

On average 52 percent[2] of all data stored by organisations worldwide is ‘dark’ as those responsible for managing it don’t have any idea about its content or value. Much has been said about the financial cost of dark data but the environmental cost has, so far, often been overlooked.  Analysts predict that the amount of data that the world will be storing will grow from 33ZB in 2018 to 175ZB by 2025[3]. This implies that, unless people change their habits, there will be 91ZB of dark data in five years’ time – over four times the volume we have today, with all the energy associated with powering the infrastructure in which it lives.

Phil Brace, Chief Sustainability Officer and Executive Vice President, Appliances and Software-defined Storage, at Veritas Technologies explains:

Around the world, individuals and companies are working to reduce their carbon footprints, but dark data doesn’t often feature on people’s action lists. However, dark data is producing more carbon dioxide than 80 different countries do individually, so it’s clear that this is an issue that everyone needs to start taking really seriously. Filtering dark data, and deleting the information that’s not needed, should become a moral imperative for businesses everywhere.

The IT industry has to get ahead of the challenge, since data volumes are getting bigger every year. We’re predicting huge growth in the amount of data being created by IoT devices, and this is what industry analysts suggest will comprise the lions’ share of the 175ZB of data we’re expecting by 2025. Businesses need to understand this type of data, and the storage policies around it, so that we don’t see emissions spiral.  But, we can all play a role in this individually too.  Nearly every one of us stores data that we’ll never access again, simply because cloud storage is so cheap and available to us – thousands of videos and photos that we’ll never look at, or emails that we’ll never read – and there are hundreds of millions of people doing this.  Businesses and consumers everywhere need to learn how to manage their data for the sake of the planet.”

 

Veritas has defined best practices that will enable organisations worldwide not only to delete data waste with confidence but also help them to reduce cost and strengthen their compliance:

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[1] Numbers calculated by mapping industry data on power consumption from data storage, industry data on emissions from data centres and Veritas Databerg Research

2 Veritas Databerg Research

3 The Digitization of the World, From Edge to Core, IDC, November 2018

[1] Numbers calculated by mapping industry data on power consumption from data storage, industry data on emissions from data centres and Veritas Databerg Research

[2] Veritas Databerg Research

[3] The Digitization of the World, From Edge to Core, IDC, November 2018

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