Strain to plan for synthetic intelligence (AI) initiatives has led IT leaders to maintain knowledge that may solely be used as soon as and elevated the prevalence of single-use knowledge that fills storage by no means to be accessed once more.

On the similar time, stress on prices and the need to function extra sustainably has turn out to be much more difficult as a result of IT departments can not determine knowledge to delete, and in some circumstances it’s simply cheaper to maintain it endlessly.

These are a number of the key findings of a survey by storage and knowledge administration provider NetApp, which questioned greater than 1,000 knowledge managers or architects within the UK in January 2025.

Within the survey, 92% of these questioned acknowledged the affect of single use knowledge and need to mitigate its impact on sustainability, vitality use and storage capability, however see tackling it as difficult.

The survey discovered that companies count on their knowledge footprint to develop by 50% because of AI initiatives, though it additionally discovered that plenty of knowledge stays unused.

A couple of third (37.5%) of enterprise knowledge is believed to be unused usually, whereas one-fifth of respondents report that greater than 50% of their knowledge is unused, which impacts knowledge storage prices and vitality use, in addition to an organisation’s means to effectively handle knowledge.

Matt Watts, chief know-how evangelist at NetApp, mentioned: “British companies need to reap the advantages and alternatives introduced by AI, whereas lowering the carbon footprint of their knowledge. Tackling single-use knowledge is a key piece of this puzzle, and companies should proceed to speculate extra in reviewing and staying on prime of their knowledge estates.”

In the meantime, based on the survey, practically one third (30.5%) discover it troublesome to determine what knowledge to maintain and what to eliminate due to the information’s potential use for AI initiatives sooner or later. Many additionally reported the sheer quantity of information they maintain is a barrier to cleansing up knowledge shops, with 30% saying it’s extra economical to maintain knowledge that to try to clear it.

Most enterprise leaders (85%) see knowledge administration as a key software in efforts to scale back carbon footprint, whereas simply over 77% of organisations have tailored knowledge administration practices to knowledge necessities for AI.

The flexibility to determine knowledge for deletion appears to be a difficulty. It is a core space of information administration during which organisations can determine knowledge they not have to hold in any respect, or which might be archived to less expensive media within the cloud or elsewhere.

Throughout the survey, slightly below 27% mentioned they lacked the sources to determine whether or not knowledge is helpful or not, whereas the identical quantity cited an absence of price range or sources to handle knowledge disposal.

That contrasts sharply with responses from SMEs, the place 24% don’t see knowledge administration as a big pillar of organisational efforts to scale back knowledge footprint. SMEs additionally positioned sustainability considerations third, with 24% – the most important proportion – of them seeing discount of IT spend as the important thing motive to scale back single use knowledge.

In the meantime, whereas 76% of UK companies have began emigrate some knowledge to the cloud in an effort to fulfill sustainability targets.

The survey additionally discovered “micro-businesses” are least probably – 59% of these questioned – to see cloud migration as a software to fulfill sustainability necessities. That might be as a result of they function largely within the cloud already or that they think about their impact on the atmosphere to be minimal anyway.