The average mid-sized UK organisation holding 1,000 terabytes of information is spending £435,000 annually on data it knows to be useless, a new report has claimed.

According to the ‘Databerg Report’ by Veritas Technologies, masses of redundant, obsolete and trivial data in UK organisations mean that just 12% of the cost of data storage is known to be business-critical.

The study found a typical UK organisation reports ‘dark data’ – data whose value has not been identified – rates of 59%, compared to the EMEA average of 54%.

Meanwhile, data identified as redundant, obsolete or trivial was found to represent 29% of a UK organisation’s data, compared to the EMEA average of 32%.

This equates to wasted corporate resources in EMEA of up to £576 billion on storing redundant, obsolete and trivial data if companies don’t change their strategy and culture around information management.

As organisations move more data into the cloud to cope with the escalating data volumes, the study revealed cloud storage and processing will increase by a third (from 33% to 45%) across EMEA over the next 12 months.

>See also: How companies are losing millions through shoddy data

However, with only 43% of respondents in the UK stating they will utilise cloud storage facilities by 2016, the country is behind the European average.

There is a higher risk that organisations adopting these cloud services might not have appropriate policies to calculate the follow-up costs, switch to another provider, or retreat from the cloud in case of emergency.

“Data should deliver on its promise and work for the organisation,” said Matthew Ellard, senior VP EMEA at Veritas, “but it’s apparent that in the UK it is the other way round. Companies invest a significant amount of resources to maintain data that is totally irrelevant for their businesses.

“A typical mid-sized company with 500 terabytes of data wastes nearly a million pounds each year maintaining trivial files, including photos, personal ID doc, music and videos.”