From ROT to CLEAN | Harmony House Insights

The ROT term has become outdated (ironic, no?). It's time for a better, more empowering term.

A walk down memory lane

Fifteen years back, I’d walk around datacentres checking their physical processes that took into security, access controls and standard operating procedures. I saw datacentres from London to Chicago! What was always impressive was the rows of technology, all pristine... however, the answers about what was on them were often vague.

Chicago 2011. A view of downtown taken with an iPhone 4.

But here’s what I keep thinking about now: Those same datacentres still exist. Still powered, still cooled, and still holding the same files I logged... now buried under another decade of digital debris.

Let's be honest about ROT

We’ve all heard the acronym. Redundant. Outdated. Trivial. ROT. Frankly, it's all getting a bit boring! It’s been the default term for forgotten files and bloated shared drives for more than a decade. And honestly? It’s as tired as the data it describes.

Everyone agrees ROT is a problem. But not many are doing anything meaningful about it. It just keeps growing, on and on and on... consuming money, energy and emitting lots of CO2.

The Growing Risks

• Rising cloud costs from storing things you no longer use.
• GDPR and retention violations from data you forgot you had.
• Security gaps from files that fall outside of policy or monitoring.
• Increased CO₂ emissions from storing data with no value.

ROT is easy to ignore, until it isn’t.

What if we flipped it?

What if, instead of just complaining about ROT, we transformed it into something positive? Something measurable, valuable and sustainable.

What if ROT became CLEAN?

Classified

You know what it is and where it came from.

Legal

It is retained, used, or deleted according to policy.

Essential

It serves a current business or operational purpose.

Auditable

It can be traced, justified, and governed.

Necessary

It belongs in your environment, not just because it was dumped there.

CLEAN data is intentional data. It’s what every enterprise says it wants... trusted, clean, usable information. But it starts by addressing what’s already sitting quietly in storage.

A practical way forward

At Harmony House (partnering with Lightning IQ), we don’t promise magic, we offer visibility. Our approach is grounded in a simple cycle:

Discover → Cleanse → Archive or Leverage → Understand → Protect

You start by asking:

What do we actually have?
Who owns it?
Is it needed?
Is it safe?

And then you act on the answers. Some clients find that 20–30% of their unstructured data has no business being there. That’s storage reclaimed with Risk reduced, budget being freed and ESG impact lowered.

And once the foundations are clean, you can build with confidence into AI, automation, analytics, and beyond.

Closing Thoughts

ROT may be a tired acronym. But the problem is still very real, and maybe the fix isn’t just deletion. Maybe it’s just that mindset change of: how do I make my data CLEAN?

Ready to find out what’s really in your storage?

Start Your Audit

Nick Pollard is Managing Director (EMEA) for Harmony House Technology. He is a seasoned leader with more than 20 years of experience working in real-time investigation, legal and compliance workflows across highly regulated environments.

Connect