There seems to be confusion in corporate America about whether or not to delete data. On one hand, there are legal departments that advise keeping everything forever, and on the other are those that recommend deleting everything as a matter of policy as soon as possible — whacking away at files and folders on your file servers like a drunk landscaper whirling a weed whacker around your yard. Meanwhile, IT is stuck in the middle trying to develop and engineer systems to enforce ever-changing data retention policies.

With a rash of security breaches and companies getting slapped with huge fines for mismanaging data during legal investigations, for some, the only reasonable thing to do is delete all data. The view taken by some is that if there’s no data, then it can’t be stolen and won’t available for evidence in a lawsuit. Unfortunately, this is rarely true and likely to cost a lot more in the long run.

Data Is A Corporate Asset

So what is all this data they want you to delete? It’s everything. It’s email, Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents, sales data, accounting, market data, personnel files, pictures, videos, utility bills, cloud services, phone activity, website data — everything.

How you collect, manage and use that data is vital to the success of your business. It will determine your costs, liabilities, exposure, profits and ability to be competitive. Data is being generated every day, every minute, every second. You’ve been generating it for years and it’s growing fast.

In fact, data growth in the “digital universe” will be over 44 trillion gigabytes in just two years. What’s more, over 780 billion text messages are sent each month, over 210 billion emails are sent every day and there are more than 883 petabytes of internet video surveillance traffic sent per month, and that doesn’t include YouTube, Netflix or any other kind of video traffic.

All that data allows you to make better business decisions by using business analytics, creating models and discovering emergent properties within a system to enhance business growth. Data is the cheapest the first time it’s generated. The costs of data increase the further away you get from its point of origin.

Also, keep in mind that the value of your organization’s data is extremely high. This is the specific data that’s unique and proprietary to your company and provides the competitive advantage that no one else has access to. Once the data is gone, it’s usually gone forever or exceedingly expensive and difficult to reclaim.