Every organisation stores more data than it needs. Some of it is essential, some of it is required by regulation, and much of it simply lingers, duplicated, outdated or trivial. This redundant, obsolete, and trivial information, often called ROT data, is quietly costing businesses money every year.
The estimates in this article are hypothetical, based on average industry data about the cost of hosting, maintaining, and managing enterprise information. Even conservative calculations show that ROT data can represent a major ongoing expense, one that few organizations measure or manage.
How much of your data is actually useful?
Most companies assume that the majority of their data has value. The evidence says otherwise.
A Veritas “Databerg” report found that only about 15% of stored enterprise data is business critical. The rest is either “dark data” (content whose value is unknown) or explicitly redundant, obsolete, or trivial, roughly 29% of the total.
A global Splunk and Enterprise Strategy Group study cited by IBM revealed that 60% of business leaders believe half or more of their organization’s data is “dark,” meaning they do not know what it contains or whether it has value. Nearly one-third said three-quarters of their data fell into this category.
When most of your stored information is either ROT or dark, every terabyte you host carries a cost with no return.
The direct costs of ROT
The total cost of storing enterprise data is far higher than the cost of disks or cloud subscriptions alone. It includes infrastructure, power, cooling, administration, and licensing.
A Gartner analysis estimated that the fully loaded cost of storing 1 terabyte (TB) of enterprise data can exceed US$3,300 per year once operational expenses are included. The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) also notes that when backup, management, and support are factored in, the total annual cost can reach US$20,000 to US$30,000 per TB in some large organizations.
Storage costs per terabyte have dropped over the years, but total volumes have exploded. Most companies now spend more overall on storage, not less. Each terabyte that provides no business value therefore represents a recurring, unnecessary cost.
The Hidden Productivity Cost
The financial impact of ROT extends beyond hardware and hosting, however. In other words, it’s not just about hosting costs (that’s only a small part of the equation).
According to IBM, unmanaged and unknown data leads to “inefficiency costs,” since employees waste time searching for the right information or recreating work that already exists.
AIIM estimates that between one-third and two-thirds of enterprise content in unmanaged environments is ROT. Over time, this accumulation of irrelevant data creates a “productivity tax” that affects nearly every department. You’re probably familiar with this, regardless of what department you work in.
A Hypothetical Example: A 1,000-Person Organization
Let’s imagine a mid-sized professional services firm with 1,000 employees.
- The company stores about 500 terabytes of unstructured data across file servers, email, collaboration tools, and archives.
- Based on the Veritas Databerg ratios, around 29% (145 TB) of this is ROT.
- The remaining data includes a large proportion of “dark” content whose value is unclear.
- Direct Storage Savings
If we use a conservative figure of US$2,000 per TB per year for the total cost of storing, powering, and managing data (well below Gartner’s upper estimate), then those 145 TB of ROT are costing roughly US$290,000 each year just to host.
A targeted data clean-up program won’t remove everything; some content must be retained for legal or operational reasons. But even if half of the ROT can be safely deleted, that’s 72 TB eliminated, or about US$145,000 in recurring annual savings.
This estimate is consistent with Veritas’s Databerg projections (mentioned above), which suggest that a company of this size could waste close to US$1 million per year on storing unnecessary information if left unchecked.
- Productivity Value
Suppose 600 of the 1,000 employees are knowledge workers with an average fully loaded annual cost of US$60,000. If disorganized, ROT-heavy systems waste just 5% of their time, that’s US$3,000 per person per year, or US$1.8 million across those 600 staff.
Cleaning up data and improving classification won’t recover all of that, but even reclaiming 25% of that time translates to roughly US$450,000 in productivity value every year.
When added to the US$145,000 in storage savings, the total annual benefit comes to around US$600,000. Over three years, that’s US$1.8 million in savings and efficiency gains for this hypothetical company.
Why This Matters
Reducing ROT, as we’ve mentioned before, also reduces exposure to risk. Old, unmanaged files often contain outdated personal data or sensitive information that should no longer exist. Deleting or archiving them defensibly lowers compliance costs and strengthens data protection under regulations such as GDPR and ISO 27001. The compliance environment is increasingly unforgiving to companies that breach these strict rules
It also improves environmental performance. Every terabyte of cloud data consumes energy and contributes to carbon emissions. International Energy Agency data shows that global data centres already use nearly 1% of the world’s electricity demand. Fewer redundant files mean a smaller digital carbon footprint.
Finally, good data hygiene improves decision-making. When systems hold only relevant, current information, it stands to reason the analysis and decisions you make are fundamentally more accurate.
This is where Crown Information Management supports clients: combining technology with governance and people-focused processes to make information simpler, safer, and more sustainable.
Want to learn more about ROT data and how to tackle it? Download our white paper: From ROT to ROI, today.
