The correct answer is storage is cheap and easily expanded. DAMA-DMBOK2 discusses retention and disposal as important lifecycle-management responsibilities. Although information that no longer provides business, legal, regulatory, historical, or evidentiary value should normally be disposed of according to approved retention policies, organizations often postpone disposal because modern storage appears inexpensive and technically easy to expand.
This reasoning is deceptive. The acquisition cost of storage is only one component of total information-management cost. Retaining unnecessary information also increases backup requirements, recovery time, discovery obligations, privacy exposure, security risk, metadata-management effort, migration complexity, and the volume of information that must be governed. DMBOK2 therefore stresses that non-value-adding information should not be retained merely because storage capacity is readily available.
From a Data Quality perspective, excessive retention also increases the population of obsolete, redundant, and potentially inconsistent information. This makes profiling, lineage analysis, master-data reconciliation, and authoritative-source identification more difficult.
A sound governance program consequently combines retention schedules, legal requirements, metadata classification, defensible disposal procedures, and clear accountability so that data is retained for legitimate reasons rather than technological convenience.
Reference Topics: DAMA-DMBOK2 — Document and Content Management; Retention and Disposal; Information Lifecycle; Data Governance; Chapter 13 — Data Quality and Obsolete Data.
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