As part of the data classification planning exercise associated with sensible MAID initiatives, organizations have an opportunity to eliminate two things: 1) data that is unnecessary and has no business value and 2) older hardware. As the Wikibon community has often stated, the only way lower the energy bill is to unplug hardware and get rid of stuff. As well, the root cause of inefficient storage is not poor technology but rather inadequate data management practices.

Planning for MAID provides an opportunity to get rid of unwanted information, implement sound retention and data migration policies and consolidate (i.e. unplug) outdated hardware.

Action Item: Don't allow MAID to be a band-aid to avoid addressing root cause storage and energy efficiency woes. Technologies like MAID may buy some time, but ultimately users need to classify data, destroy information that has no business value, develop and institutionalize retention policies, and implement good tiered storage management and archiving software.