What are the problems caused by the proliferation of data brokers?

Answer 1

The problem of data proliferation is affecting all areas of commerce as the result of the availability of relatively inexpensive data storage devices. This has made it very easy to dump data into secondary storage immediately after its window of usability has passed. This masks problems that could gravely affect the profitability of businesses and the efficient functioning of health services, police and security forces, local and national governments, and many other types of organization. Data proliferation is problematic for several reasons:

• Difficulty when trying to find and retrieve information. At Xerox, on average it takes employees more than one hour per week to find hard-copy documents, costing $2,152 a year to manage and store them. For businesses with more than 10 employees, this increases to almost two hours per week at $5,760 per year. In large networks of primary and secondary data storage, problems finding electronic data are analogous to problems finding hard copy data.
• Data loss and legal liability when data is disorganized, not properly replicated, or cannot be found in a timely manner. In April 2005, Ameritrade Holding Corporation told 200,000 current and past customers that a tape containing confidential information had been lost or destroyed in transit. In May of the same year, Time Warner Incorporated reported that 40 tapes containing personal data on 600,000 current and former employees had been lost en route to a storage facility. In March 2005, a Florida judge hearing a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Morgan Stanley issued an "adverse inference order" against the company for "willful and gross abuse of its discovery obligations." The judge cited Morgan Stanley for repeatedly finding misplaced tapes of e-mail messages long after the company had claimed that it had turned over all such tapes to the court.
• Increased manpower requirements to manage increasingly chaotic data storage resources.
• Slower networks and application performance due to excess traffic as users search and search again for the material they need.
• High cost in terms of the energy resources required to operate storage hardware. A 100 terabyte system will cost up to $35,040 a year to run-not counting cooling costs.