Conventional wisdom holds that the key to winning in big data is scaling one's data collection, storage, and analysis capabilities faster than one's competitor. The more data you have, the more trends you can uncover, and the better your ML models will be, the thinking goes. But in some situations, holding onto data is a liability that can cost you millions. That's why the smarter companies know when to let the data go. While some data clearly has value and should be kept, other pieces of data can actually be deleterious to a company's financial and legal health and should be disposed as soon as legally possible, says Bill Tolson, vice president of global compliance for Archive360.