The Bucket List

It is a ritual around our house, on your birthday you get measured and it gets recorded. Today is my son’s birthday and he grew 3 and 5/8 inches in the past year, which in absolute terms is his largest year to year increase. Tomorrow is my birthday and I guarantee that my height didn’t change. But then again the metric that is important to me is my weight, not my height. This just serves as a reminder that not all data is of equal value.

This leads me to the "A word" and the topic archiving. It cost real money, in terms of both CAPEX and OPEX to archive data so the decision should not be made lightly. We know that some data has real value and needs to be protected. We also know that other data has no value and needs to be purged. And there is a lot of data in between. So this begs the question of how should an organization categorize their static data? I tend to put non-production data into one of the following five buckets:

1. Clear Business Value
2. Governance Mandate
3. Compliance Requirement
4. Deer in headlights
5. No value

By far the simplest item to deal with is the data has no value. Common sense would suggest that .MP3, .MOV, .FLV; etc files don’t belong in a long term archive unless perhaps you are an entertainment company. Three years ago I was in NYC meeting with a company thinking about implementing an archiving strategy. We scanned their shared network storage and applied a filter that only looks at files not accessed in the past 18 months. They were surprised that over 2TBs of these personal entertainment files were being stored on enterprise class NAS despite policies against this activity. Good news is that their problem is easy to fix, just follow the steps below:

1. Establish and publish policies giving people a timeline to adhere to them.
2. Work with the groups that have valid reasons to save audio and video materials to store them in designated areas.
3. Enforce the policy on a quarterly basis. If you don’t enforce policies nobody will adhere to them, including others in IT.
4. Establish a feedback loop by reporting aggregate level details to management on a quarterly. After all you are reducing expenses and improving efficiency.

Political and personal landmines can be avoided by asking yourself "who gives a crap" about the impact of what I'm about to do. For instance you don't want to delete the VP of PRs audioboos without giving them plenty of notice otherwise you could find your being called a lot of "A words" and your IT career on a fast track to doing thankless tasks like monitoring a long data migration project.

In the next blog posting we will continue to deal with the remaining bucket list items.