New research from the Blancco Technology Group has revealed the staggering cost of organisations storing old, outdated IT equipment in their data centres.The firm surveyed 600 data centre experts from APAC, Europe and North America to discover that two in five organisations that store their data in-house are spending over $100,000 to store useless IT hardware that could pose a security or compliance risk to their business.Surprisingly more than half of these companies (54%) have been cited at least once or twice by regulators or governing bodies for non-compliance with international data protection laws. Organisations could incur fines of up to $1.5m for HIPAA violations due to storing data past its retention date and these fines are multiplied by the number of years each violation has been allowed to persist.Blancco's study, The High Cost of Cluttered Data Centers, highlights how global organisations are paralysed by fear of reputational damage.

The risk that sensitive data stored on old IT hardware being breached or misuses could severely affect an organisation's reputation as well as the trust of its customers.Organisations are spending vast amounts of money storing these devices even though this practice is in direct contradiction to data protection laws and regulations such as GDPR.Vice President of Enterprise and Cloud Erasure Solutions at Blancco, Fredrik Forslund provided further insight on the risk of storing outdated IT equipment, saying:"Global organizations are unnecessarily wasting vast sums of money from noncompliance and onsite storage fees – charges that could be easily mitigated.

This points to a huge lack of education within the sector about what to do with hardware that is faulty or has reached end-of-life.

Organizations are letting this hardware pile up in fear of data leakage, resulting in loss of efficiency, increasing capital costs, possible noncompliance and potential security risks."