Shining a Light on Your Dark Data

Is your data hiding?

Experts estimate between 50% and 80% of company data is ‘dark data’.

Over the last 10 years since McCrindle began, we’ve partnered with hundreds of companies across all types of industries. Working with decision makers wanting to make evidence-based decisions. We see many struggling every day with reading, understanding and managing the data they have at their fingertips.

The emergence of the technological age has seen our society create and collate data like never before. The rise of ‘smart’ technologies, such as phones, watches, televisions and more, has resulted in more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day. This represents 90% of all the data in history, created in just two years. For many organisations, however, much of this data is going unused.

Only 15% of data is being optimised

The average company stores 10 petabytes of data.1 That’s 10 million gigabytes, or approximately 23.1 billion files.2 Out of all these files, however, only 15% are considered ‘business-critical’. Meanwhile, between 50% and 80% of files fall into the category ‘dark data’.3 The term ‘dark data’, which has been growing in popularity amongst data scientists and analysts worldwide, refers to data created by an organisation that is then forgotten.

The average company stores 14.3 billion unused dark files

Unfortunately, in the race for data optimisation, Australia ranks third to last. As the third biggest hoarder of dark data, more than two fifths of corporate data in Australia is classified as dark (62%).4 Our current rate of dark data collection is beaten only by Germany (66%) and Canada (64%).

Reducing dark data increases revenue

In order to step out of the dark data shadow, organisations need to optimise their data usage. Investigating dark data presents opportunities for organisations to not only reduce data waste, but reduce storage costs, improve processes and raise revenues.
Reducing the amount of unwanted dark data in an organisation can serve to reduce unnecessary storage costs. With 62% of data storage budgets being spent on dark data, reducing waste may present a significant cost saving.

Discovering unique data opportunities

At the same time, dark data represents an untapped data mine for many organisations. While for some organisations dark data may represent waste, it might also present exciting opportunities. New data sources can be opportunities for businesses to improve processes and enhance efficiency. Improved analytics can reveal business operations where time, money or resources may currently be wasted. This rich information may easily be going unused by your business, lost in the world of dark data.

For those willing to shine a light in the data darkness, there are exciting business opportunities to be discovered.

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