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FILE CTERA finds 95% of enterprise file data rarely used Cloud file system supplier CTERA commissioned research that found just 4.4 percent of enterprise file data is actively used. An analysis of 16 petabytes of live production data across 856 file-share scans in enterprise NAS environments, including regulated industries, found that 95.6 percent of it was inactive; redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data that serves no clear business purpose. Specifically: - 83.1 percent of the total stored capacity is in files that have not been modified in more than a year, - 97.5 percent of individual files had not been modified in more than a year, - 88 percent of individual files had not been accessed in more than one year, - Only 9.9 percent of stored data was accessed in any given 90-day period. This ROT data consumes storage as it is backed up, protected, and managed, increasing the resources needed to maintain the overall data estate. CTERA CTO Aron Brand said: "When only 4.4 percent of capacity is actively used, enterprises are running their most expensive storage tier as what is effectively a cold archive. That creates a multiplier effect across storage and data protection costs, security exposure, and now the quality of information available to AI systems.” In his view: ”This points to a fundamental challenge in how organizations think about data management. The answer isn't simply to delete old data, it's to make better decisions about where that data belongs. Information can be retained and protected without living on expensive primary storage.” The implication is that CTERA is going to do something about this. It always has had an archival use case, which enables users with permission to move inactive data from primary storage into cost‑efficient archive cloud folders, while keeping it accessible by CTERA services and as metadata. Now it's doing more, as its latest Edge Filer v7.13x includes an Archive function which “allows you to archive your inactive data, effectively reducing your storage costs.” This is early access build software (v713.6000.19) and not yet generally available. Customers would use CTERA's InsightAI function to analyse their storage and identify what old stored data could be moved to cheaper online secondary storage. InsightAI uses artificial intelligence to connect data activity, audit trails, metadata, permissions, capacity trends, and security events into a clear view of what is happening and where action is needed. It provides AI-powered visibility into storage growth, stale data, usage trends, and data lifecycle inefficiencies to help organizations reduce unnecessary storage expansion, improve forecasting accuracy, and optimize capacity utilization. InsightAI can be deployed as a CTERA-hosted SaaS offering, within a managed customer VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) on Azure or AWS, or fully deployed within customer-controlled private cloud environments, including AWS GovCloud and Azure Government. The findings of this Cold Data Report research can be found here.
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