The sheer amount of data "out there" is growing at a staggering rate. In 2010, according to an IBM estimate, total recorded data was doubling every eleven hours. Don't be surprised if it is growing at a similar pace within your organization. Some of it may be outdated, and much more may be harmless. But you still need to keep track of it, or how will you know?

And data breaches are an unwelcome fact of life. Last year saw hackers steal 100 million customers' data from Sony, as well as the WikiLeaks breach that exposed thousands of highly sensitive US government documents. Only days ago, retailer Zappos suffered a customer data breach – while Symantec admitted that hackers had made off with source code for Norton security applications.