CISOs are quietly wishing they had less data, because the cost of management sometimes exceeds its value

I recently got to play a 'fly on the wall' at a roundtable of chief information security officers. Beyond the expected griping and moaning about funding shortfalls and always-too-gullible users, I began to hear a new note: data has become a problem.

A generation ago we had hardly any data at all. In 2003 I took a tour of a new all-digital 'library' – the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) – and marveled at its single petabyte of online storage. I'd never seen so much, and it pointed toward a future where we would all have all the storage capacity we ever needed.

That day arrived not many years later when Amazon's S3 quickly made scale a non-issue. Today, plenty of enterprises manage multiple petabytes of storage and we think nothing about moving a terabyte across the network or generating a few gigabytes of new media during a ...