Data Retention: Tough Choices Ahead

As the cost per byte of storage has declined, it has become a habit to simply store data "just in case." At a time when the overwhelming majority of data was generated by human beings, nobody thought much of it. Data was summarized, information extracted from it and the raw data points were still kept should they be needed later. Cisco tells us that as of 2008, there were more things connected to the internet than people, so we can use that as the point in time when the amount of data being generated and stored had its hockey stick moment. Now we have more sensors in more places monitoring more and more activity and generating more and more data points.