Extinguishing on behalf of man and nature

When you see pictures of the new gigantic data centers that are springing up all over the world, it's easy to take your breath away: several thousand square meters of concentrated energy that make the smoking factories of the first and second industrial revolutions look almost lovely. And for what? To fire up our digital world 24/7 and store all data production in clouds. Cloud, that sounds light and airy - but the massive farms are far from that. Billions of servers around the world need to be cooled and computers supplied with power.

Saving by hook or by crook

Few people still feel ashamed when they diligently duplicate files and documents multiple times and, above all, never delete anything. But more and more environmentalists are noticing that "click shame" is the new "flight shame. And it's all because people don't delete. But why do so many find it so difficult to part with their documents? Because we've forgotten how to do it.

Whereas it used to be necessary to limit oneself to the essentials because storage media were limited in size and storage space was expensive, the tide has turned in recent years. Messages, documents, files and photos disappear - because it's so easy - into the cloud, sometimes never to be seen again. For companies in particular, this leads to other problems in addition to the environmental issue.

Every single file requires storage space, which causes costs in the companies, but on top of that - and this can be even more decisive in the long run: Document masses lead to the fact that in daily work the relevant can hardly be seen in the fog of the irrelevant.

The University of Bamberg is also researching this question under the motto "Dare2Del". One of the cornerstones of their research is the knowledge that digital data that has become redundant makes the search for information more difficult, delays decisions and distracts from tasks at hand.

Professor and project leader Uta Schmid concludes that sensible deletion increases work performance. But even though deletion is becoming more prominent, the researchers know that very few people want to think about archiving while they are working. Keep or delete? This should happen as unobtrusively as possible in the background - reliably, intelligently and, of course, sustainably.

Autonomous archiving

Steffen Holzmann, green IT expert at Deutsche Umwelthilfe, advises: delete old e-mails. Unsubscribe from newsletters you don't need. But that's not enough in the corporate environment, of course. Especially the daily created documents are a challenge in terms of gigabyte gigantism.

If we want to deal with the topic of archiving in an environmentally and performance-conscious manner and minimize the manual considerations of employees, we must count on intelligent software. KGS calls this archiving solution "Tia" - The Intelligent Archive. The goal: autonomous archiving that recognizes patterns itself and offers "Predictive Archiving Services".

The intelligent archive makes deletion suggestions, reorganizes overflowing archives, relieves expensive storage space and makes sensible use of inexpensive storage. Machine learning is the magic word: The system learns and differentiates. A legally relevant document is "stored" differently than an everyday note.

A document that does not contain a retention period, has not been brought to the screen for years, is available twice or three times, is displayed as data garbage to be deleted - or for the completely cured data messies: directly disposed of automatically. Yes, the collector's heart in us rebels. But humans and nature urgently need air to breathe.