Why Software And Data Waste Has To Stop
People waste technology. Most of us have an additional smartphone, tablet, laptop or perhaps an additional extraneous webcam, Bluetooth loudspeaker or some other device that we’re hoarding, sometimes because we keep it as a backup… and sometimes because we all just get our hands on too many of these things.
But that’s just hardware.
Waste happens at the software and data level too, especially in enterprise environments where unused applications and data stores exist either in on-premises data room facilities, in public cloud datacenter instance contracts, or across a hybrid-cloud span of both environments.
While we don’t often think of ‘software wastage’ as a defined entity, this modern phenomenon is surprisingly prevalent. But why?
Sometimes platform vendors bundle more applications and services together than a customer might ever reasonably want, sometimes duplication happens as a result of mergers & takeovers etc, sometimes customers opt for too many services at the outset in order to cover risks and achieve discounts, sometimes it’s a combination of both sides of the customer-sales channel with enterprise software vendors operating bloated technology stacks that don’t ever seem to offer a ‘lite meal’ option i.e. it’s big eat or nothing.
This wastage factor is of course doing more damage to the environment than many realize. Modern cloud datacenters are some of the most carbon-intensive aspects of business today, but CIOs have the power to become new environmental, social & governance (ESG) champions if they clean up and optimize the mess by providing transparent, data-driven insights and measurable progress toward objectives.
Always vocal on this subject is Kelly Fleming in his role as, co-founder & CIO ofCirrus Nexus, a company that works to provide businesses with direct control to monitor and optimize their cloud spend.
“As organizations grow and their IT operations become more complex, CIOs are faced with the challenge of managing an ever-growing set of data in both cost- and energy-efficient ways,” said Fleming. “While the cloud offers a seemingly endless number of resources to maintain and store data, failing to control and limit data hoarding can affect not just a company’s bottom line but its sustainability goals as well. CIOs have the power to become ESG leaders for their companies by implementing sound policies for managing data growth efficiently.”
The Cirrus Nexus tech lead notes that while many organizations have policies in place indicating when data should be archived and/or deleted, many have trouble enforcing those policies in the increasingly complex world of cloud computing.
This is because data in the cloud often ends up on a variety of orphaned, unused resources of different types, from disks and databases to ‘storage blobs’ and data lakes.
“Without proper tagging mechanisms in place, it can be challenging to keep track of data resources’ service owners. This keeps cost optimizers, looking to clear up waste, hesitant as deleting data without its service owners’ approval can create bigger problems than they solve. Meanwhile, all those resources continue to consume power [electricity] every day up until the moment they are deleted,” notes Fleming.
His team recommend enforcing a tagging policy to keep track of data service owners as a sure way to make sure an IT department’s clean-up mechanism processes are done efficiently.
Where a company actually chooses to locate its stored data is another way to limit its carbon impact. The suggestion here is that CIOs should look to use datacenters with low PUE (power usage effectiveness) and/or invest in improving their own on-premises datacenter’s PUE. Further, they should also look for datacenters located in regions that draw on a greater percentage of renewable energy.
“In the United States, some of the cleanest running datacenters run primarily on hydro in the Northwest and a combination of solar and wind in the Southwest.
