Asia Pacific is powering the world’s digital future. In 2024 alone, countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand attracted over US$15.5 billion in cross-border data centre investments, making up 70% of global investments. But behind this rapid growth is a costly and often overlooked truth: our data environment is bloated with a significant amount of unproductive data.
Singapore’s data centres already contribute to 82% of the ICT sector’s emissions and 7% of national electricity use. This is not just high IT performance demand, but also vast amounts of dark, unused data. Studies estimate 50–60% of enterprise data sits idle, generating costs, consuming energy, and delivering no business value. According to the World Economic Forum, a mid-sized data-driven business can generate up to nearly 3 terabytes of dark data daily.
Without smarter data management, organisations will struggle to advance both their digital transformation and sustainability ambitions; a strategic trade-off that no organisation can afford to ignore in today’s business environment.
The case for smarter data consumption
At a surface level, storing dark data doesn’t feel like an urgent problem. Unlike a ransomware attack or a server outage, its impact is not always immediate or visible. However, just like a diet overloaded with empty calories, the consequences of dark data are cumulative.
For C-level executives across Asia Pacific, dark data has evolved from a niche IT concern to a strategic liability that poses financial, environmental, and strategic risks:
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- Environmental cost: Similar to lighting empty offices, storing dark data burns energy with no return on investment. This quietly erodes sustainability gains and drives up emissions.
- Financial cost: Irrelevant and redundant data inflates cloud and infrastructure costs—straining IT budgets in an already challenging economic environment.
- Strategic cost: Poor data hygiene can clutter IT systems and hinder analytics, leading to inaccurate insights, delay decisions and compromise agility. This exposes them to greater risk in falling behind more agile competitors.
The stakes are rising: 74% of the top 400 firms in Asia Pacific now link executive incentives to ESG metrics. In Singapore, ESG reporting standards are also tightening, with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announcing plans to introduce mandatory climate-related disclosures based on the ISSB standards by 2025. A bloated data estate doesn’t just impair efficiency—it threatens credibility, investor trust, and long-term value.
A high-performance data nutrition plan
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To move forward, businesses must adopt a more intentional approach: one that prioritises data quality, visibility, and value. Much like elite athletes require disciplined, purposeful nutrition to perform at their peak, modern enterprises must adopt a “data nutrition” mindset: Curate the useful, shed excess, and fuel growth with efficiency and clarity.
Here’s how leading organisations are transforming their data diets:
- Understand your energy use
Organisations can’t reduce what they can’t measure. Intelligent data infrastructure offers real-time visibility into energy use, minimises data duplication through advanced backup tools that capture multiple snapshots of data, and supports sustainable operations.
Furthermore, with sustainability dashboards like NetApp BlueXP and infrastructure insights, organisations can orchestrate seamless data movement across on-premises and hybrid/multicloud environments, uncover inefficiencies, assess environmental impact, and make informed decisions to reduce power usage.
- Store only what you need
The instinct to “store everything” is outdated and costly. Intelligent classification tools allow businesses to identify, manage, or remove redundant and outdated data. This translates to lower power, cooling, and infrastructure needs, translating to a smaller carbon footprint and stronger ROI.
From a business standpoint, this is about striking the right balance. Mission-critical applications demand flash storage for speed and lower power usage, despite higher costs. On the flip side, cold or infrequently accessed data can be archived to lower-cost, energy-efficient options depending on customer SLAs and usage needs.
- Migrate with purpose to the cloud
Not all data belongs on high-performance, high-cost infrastructure. Neither are all cloud environments cost-effective. Intelligent tiering and smart migration of data are not just about saving costs—it’s about aligning IT decisions with your ESG strategy and business goals. Modern tools like NetApp BlueXP empower businesses to move data to the most efficient environment based on performance, cost, and carbon targets. This helps organisations right-size their infrastructure and maximise their IT investments.
- Maximise on-premises efficiency
Legacy hardware is a silent drain on both energy and agility. By upgrading to flash-optimised, energy-efficient systems, organisations can reduce power consumption by up to 55% and rack space usage by up to 80%, while boosting performance.
With modern, intelligent systems designed for AI adoption today, businesses can unlock faster insights, smarter automation, and competitive differentiation. AI-ready platforms not only drive operational gains, but they also help quantify ESG metrics and protect data.
Smarter data, sharper business
In the boardrooms of tomorrow, sustainability is less a side metric and more a defining differentiator for an organisation’s success. As ESG disclosures tighten, investor scrutiny rises, and AI demands escalate, the question for C-suite leaders is no longer “How much data can we store?” but “How much value can we extract per watt of energy and per byte of data?”
In a region racing toward AI leadership, only those who treat data as a fuel—clean, lean, and intelligently consumed—will sustain performance, compliance, and trust.
Kenneth Poh is the country manager for Singapore and the Philippines at NetApp
