Data Purge Strategy: What is it and Why You Need One
Data, data, data. It seems you can’t go anywhere today without hearing how important data is to your company’s success in digital transformation. But the fact is, having too much data can actually bog your company down—leaving it vulnerable to security breaches and clogging up your ability to make smart, quick, data-backed decisions. That’s why every company that collects data today also needs to create a data purge strategy to dump that data when the time is right.
Don’t be a Data Hoarder: Create a Data Purge Strategy
Have you ever watched one of those reality TV shows about hoarders? From the comfort of our couches, we can see that it makes no sense for people to store and cling on to mounds of “stuff” that is offering little value or meaning to their lives. It makes houses messy—sometimes even dangerous. The same is true when it comes to hoarding data.
There are multiple benefits to creating a data purge strategy. Three of the biggest are as follows:
Save money from storage costs: As affordable and efficient as storing data on the cloud often seems, it certainly isn’t free. Indeed, your cloud provider may even charge early deletion fees for removing data before a certain time period. Long story short: they run a business, just like you do. And their business model is to maximize the amount they earn from companies who don’t yet understand the importance of data purge strategy!
Remember this: the less you are storing, the less you’re paying them to store. So, take time to make sure that every piece of data is worth its weight in storage space—and revisit that pool of data regularly to keep it under control.
Protect yourself and your company. The more data you have, the more difficult it is to keep your data safe. As such, storing unnecessary data leaves you open to security threats that could be avoided if you had taken time to trim the load. Remember: your company doesn’t just lose money during a data breach. It also loses consumer confidence, which could cost your company far more than lost time and productivity. Why risk that by storing information you don’t even need?
Make it easier to make data-back decisions. You know the phrase, “too many cooks in the kitchen?” Your data can suffer from a similar problem. When you have too much information from too many places, it can be hard to pull it cleanly and use it strategically.
