Pressure to plan for artificial intelligence (AI) projects has led IT leaders to keep data that might only be used once and increased the prevalence of single-use data that fills storage never to be accessed again.
At the same time, pressure on costs and the desire to operate more sustainably has become even more challenging because IT departments cannot identify data to delete, and in some cases it’s just cheaper to keep it forever.
Those are some of the key findings of a survey by storage and data management supplier NetApp, which questioned more than 1,000 data managers or architects in the UK in January 2025.
In the survey, 92% of those questioned acknowledged the impact of single use data and want to mitigate its effect on sustainability, energy use and storage capacity, but see tackling it as challenging.
The survey found that businesses expect their data footprint to grow by 50% as a result of AI projects, although it also found that lots of data remains unused.
More than one third (37.5%) of business data is believed to be unused generally, while one-fifth of respondents report that more than 50% of their data is unused, which affects data storage costs and energy use, as well as an organisation’s ability to efficiently manage data.
Matt Watts, chief technology evangelist at NetApp, said: “British businesses want to reap the benefits and opportunities presented by AI, while reducing the carbon footprint of their data. Tackling single-use data is a key piece of this puzzle, and businesses must continue to invest more in reviewing and staying on top of their data estates.”
Meanwhile, according to the survey, nearly one third (30.5%) find it difficult to identify what data to keep and what to dispose of because of the data’s potential use for AI projects in the future. Many also reported the sheer volume of data they hold is a barrier to cleaning up data stores, with 30% saying it’s more economical to keep data that to try and clean it.
Most business leaders (85%) see data management as a key tool in efforts to reduce carbon footprint, while just over 77% of organisations have adapted data management practices to data requirements for AI.
The ability to identify data for deletion seems to be an issue. This is a core area of data management in which organisations can identify data they no longer need to keep at all, or which could be archived to less costly media in the cloud or elsewhere.
Across the survey, just under 27% said they lacked the resources to identify whether data is useful or not, while the same number cited a lack of budget or resources to manage data disposal.
That contrasts sharply with responses from SMEs, where 24% don’t see data management as a significant pillar of organisational efforts to reduce data footprint. SMEs also placed sustainability concerns third, with 24% – the largest percentage – of them seeing reduction of IT spend as the key reason to reduce single use data.
Meanwhile, while 76% of UK businesses have started to migrate some data to the cloud in an effort to meet sustainability targets.
The survey also found “micro-businesses” are least likely – 59% of those questioned – to see cloud migration as a tool to meet sustainability requirements. That could be because they operate largely in the cloud already or that they consider their effect on the environment to be minimal anyway.
