By John Omartian, Director, US Group IT 

MCI Global and MCI USA are launching an initiative for a Digital Clean Up day. This will be a global initiative for MCI and coincide with the Digital Clean Up worldwide campaign. MCI USA will extend this day to a digital clean up month to allow talents to schedule time to focus to this important issue. We recommend scheduling 1 hour per week for the duration of the clean up month. This can be split to smaller chunks as needed and coordinated with your Team to divide and review all files.

Did you know that Globally the total storage in SharePoint is over 130 terabytes of data (not counting all the backups). This storage comes at a monetary cost along with an environmental cost of over 40 tons of carbon emissions annually. Unnecessary and old files, duplicates of documents, photos, videos and old emails are all digital trash that consumes energy. We also need to respect legal and ISO requirements in terms of data retention periods.

What are the goals of our Digital Clean Up Month?

It’s a time when we raise awareness on digital best practices with talents and encourage everyone to take some time to clean up our files and mailboxes.

The objectives are to:

  • Gain in efficiency and respect legal and ISO requirements.
  • Save storage costs and space.
  • Lower our digital carbon emissions.
  • Reduce our storage used by 10% through the Digital Clean Up campaign!
  • Identify old files we do not want to delete and work with the IT team to move files to the MCI online archive solution.

When does it take place and what can you do?

The official Digital Clean Up ‘Day’ was March 18, 2023. However, MCI USA’s Digital Clean Up Month runs from today through April 21st – ending on Earth Day 2023.

Clean up recommendation and best practices:

  • Review and clean up related to ISO and legal requirements:
    • Reviewing all files for personal identifiable information (PII) and any other sensitive info. If there is no business need to maintain these files we need to delete them. This is especially true if you find any files with credit card or banking information.
    • This will include old exports from AMS platforms, mailing lists for marketing campaigns, and member lists.
  • General review and clean up of files:
    • Review for extra duplicate files and folders.
      • Duplicate folders can sometimes be accidental, please review the duplicates and delete one of the duplicate copies.
    • Delete manually saved version of a document. If we have labeled files and v-1, v-2 and final. Please keep the final version but the previous iterations of the files can be deleted.
    • If there are any old photos, unusable photos (blurry etc) videos or recordings we no longer need those can be deleted.
  • If there are files that cannot be deleted but are old and just taking up space please see the section below on archiving.

MCI Archiving:

If you identify any files that are older but cannot be deleted (need to maintain for a client or for MCI USA) we have an online archive solution to save additional storage space and costs. This is an online archive, not the old method to export to an external hard drive and will be accessible to talents as long as you can access the internet.

  • Files that are not accessed or infrequently accessed (1-3 times annually) are ideal candidate files to move to the archive. Generally, most past event files older than 2 years will fall into this category.
  • Old photos dumps from past events, old video and recordings that need to be maintained but are not used regularly.

If you have files to move to the archive, please reach out to John Omartian directly or IT staff members and they can arrange a quick meeting to review. IT staff will also be reaching out to clients and divisions that have large document libraries or identified files that we would like to move to the archive.

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