Hiding in plain sight: The environmental cost of ROT data

Redundant, obsolete and trivial information (ROT) is a persistent issue and it has received significant attention in the press, mostly in terms of the compliance risks it poses, but what about the environmental cost?

Cheaper and more accessible cloud storage, while enormously convenient for business, has amplified the the environmental impact. The simple fact is that all this cheap and readily available data capacity in the cloud has reduced the urgency we used to all feel in needing to actively manage information (remember when you had to delete items on your local disk to make space for new ones?). As a result, many organisations now retain far more data than they need, for far longer than necessary.

The sustainability impact

What’s the actual impact? Unsurprisingly, digital ROT consumes vast amounts of energy, cooling and maintenance in data centres. These facilities account for an estimated 1 to 1.5 percent of global electricity use (and growing fast). Every redundantly retained file contributes to this global overhead, whether storage is on‑premises or in the cloud (it’s still a disk somewhere!).

Electricity consumption isn’t the end of it though; the manufacture, maintenance and disposal of storage media carries a huge cost if not handled properly. IT waste disposal is therefore another environmentally impactful process we need to tack on, and we’ve written about the shadow IT creep impact before. All in all, having a huge storage footprint of which perhaps only half is necessary, isn’t sustainable.

Physical ROT, and by this we mean such as paper records, obsolete devices and legacy media, requires physical storage space, climate control and eventual disposal. If not handled responsibly. In many cases it contributes directly to some of the biggest sources of landfill waste. Paper records stored in offsite facilities incur an indirect emissions footprint that’s not always clearly understood.

And finally, the financial implications are equally clear. Cloud storage fees accumulate over time, and physical storage contracts often run for years. Staff productivity is reduced when employees must search through irrelevant or outdated material to find what they need. As mentioned at the beginning, the compliance perspective is made vastly riskier by ROT; retaining personal data beyond its legal retention period can breach regulations such as GDPR, which requires that data be kept only as long as necessary.

Is there any best practice way of reducing ROT, then?

Here’s what we developed internally at Crown Information Management, as a six-step plan any organization should at least glance over before beginning a proper ROT overhaul.

1. Inventory and baseline: Identify all digital and physical information holdings. Quantify storage volumes, associated costs and estimated energy use.
2. Retention Policy alignment: Ensure retention schedules are legally compliant (this is really about protecting your own reputation more than anything) and enforced through automated rules where possible as human error is a recurring problem when it comes to illegally retained data. You may need rigorous legal advice for this one, from an in-house counsel or your retained firm.
3. Secure destruction: Apply or at least familiarize yourself with recognised standards such as ISO/IEC 21964 for paper destruction, media storage also has a similarly rigorous ISO standard, and obviously, use a circular approach wherever possible. Any reputable company will give you a destruction certificate for all data you process through them.
4. Targeted digitization: Digitize only what is necessary. This is one of the most important things often missed by companies we speak to. You don’t need to digitize everything you have in your archives.
5. Lifecycle Management: Use automated policies to move data to lower‑cost, lower‑energy storage tiers or better yet, delete it when not needed.
6. Ongoing Monitoring: Track progress against baseline metrics (we can help here) and apply environmental metrics where you can.

What does this actually look like on the ground?

Need to picture how this actually looks at the end? Here’s a hypothetical illustration based on our own experience.

Imagine a legal firm implemented a ROT reduction program that went through the six steps and removed 6,700 boxes of paper records, retired a legacy archive system and deleted 110 terabytes of cloud data. The initiative reduced storage costs, improved information retrieval times and lowered the organisation’s carbon footprint by a tenth. The project also strengthened compliance by ensuring that only current, relevant and legally permissible information was retained. They also trained staff to regularly delete ROT of their own accord, so they weren’t accruing terabytes of data after a lapse of applying more rigorous standards.

ROT is a pressing environmental concern with measurable impacts on net-zero targets. In our next article we’ll be focusing on the more headline grabbing compliance risks of ROT, including some examples of companies who faced hefty penalties for not dealing with it in time.

Our full guide, “From ROT to ROI: How Sustainable Information Management Saves Money”, will be published soon, so keep your eyes out for it.