'We're struggling like everyone else. The big part is convincing people it's going to [require] an investment to make things change,' Schwimmer said.

Other attendees agreed that convincing executives to spend money on data retention policies is an uphill battle.

Sixty-six percent of those polled said they get some opinions from executives on retention policies but no real participation, while 18 percent said they have access to every executive they need; 16 percent said they have no access to executives to discuss storage issues.

Richard Scannell, a senior vice president of worldwide delivery with consultancy Glasshouse Technologies Inc., emphasized to IT managers that they have to stop thinking about tiers of storage and think instead about 'tiers of service' based on the business value of the data. That value depends on how quickly data needs to be recovered or how much redundancy might be required to ensure it remains available, he said.

Scannell said IT managers can't afford not to begin deleting data. Even if the capacity of new storage systems doubles every 18 months, it will never be enough to keep up with data growth. Statistics show that up to 74 percent of all data storage costs can be attributed to maintenance and administration of existing storage -- not initial systems cost.