Research Xillio Shows the Ineffective Use of File Shares

Hilversum, 7 December 2016 - Xillio researched the status and quality of file shares within Dutch organizations. This research shows, amongst other things, that an average of 22% of all folders on a file share are empty and over 39% of all files are duplicates. Every duplicate document has on average 2.3 copies. The total amount of files in a file share differs strongly between the analyzed organizations: between 20 thousand and 50 million files.

Xillio put together and compared the results of the file share analyses that she performed during the last years at multiple Dutch organizations. Beside empty folders and duplicate files, the research also contains information about file size, file types and commonly used extensions. It showed that by far most files (44.8%) have a size between 10 and 100 kB. None of the organizations possessed files bigger than 100 GB. About file types, the research showed that, on average, most files are images, text, pdf and Office files. Other types of files are just a small part of the total amount of files. However, some of these ‘smaller’ classes of files (compressed, film, database and e-mail files) are, due to their big file size, an important part of the file share’s total size.

Rikkert Engels, founder and CEO of Xillio, says: “File shares still occupy a central position within Dutch organizations. We often see that the file share contains many Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) files which lead to end users having difficulties with finding files, no clear insight into the presence of sensitive data and increasing costs in storage and network management. Our research confirms the gut feeling which information and IT managers already have: their file share is a mess.”

With a file share analysis, Xillio offers organizations the possibility to get a comprehensive file analysis of the complete file share. This content analysis gives insight into the value of the content available on file shares.

Click to find more information about the file share analyses and insights Xillio offers.

You can download the full research report here.