Does this feel like a big number to scare people?
Cause it feels like a big number to scare people. 100 TB is all the space! Like... uh... 50 hard drives from Amazon. Bought for $69 a piece. But I swear it's a lot!
C'mon. I know people are programmed from birth to distrust the government (who haven't helped themselves much, regardless of citizenship) and assume the worst... but if they knew what IT policies looked like at "well-run multinationals", they would see things differently. Hell, the small company I'm at has 1TB tables in a MS SQL DB for moderate sized clients. It sure sounds large when you remember ads used to boast about 1GB hard drives, but things have changed since Pentiums ruled the world.
Sure, I'm sure that this legacy data could mostly be jettisoned, but if it's anything like the US, there are retention policies, rules, or laws that dictate what can be done with it or how accessible it should be. The finance world routinely keeps a five to seven year retention policy for audits and the like, not counting the numerous hard drives and email accounts under legal hold due to pending regulatory, civil, or criminal actions being taken.
And am I right in thinking £500M/year isn't actually that much? It sounds like a lot, but here in the US, converted to USD, that would be... 0.03% of the annual budget for the entire government, including Social Security (income for old people) and Medicare (health care for old people).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
