Of roughly 250 users polled at the conference, 51 percent said they have no way of determining the cost of storing data over time. Another 47 percent said they have a tiered storage model and some idea of what storage costs them over time, but no way to automatically migrate that data between tiers. Only 7 percent of users said they can definitely determine the value of their data.

Gary Schwimmer, a data center operations manager at Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp., said his company has developed a data retention policy and tags data using Standard Generalized Markup Language to determine what to move and when to move it.

Schwimmer said migrating data from one tier to another is still a manual process prompted by an automated e-mail notification system developed in-house.

Another big issue for users is that they have no way of ensuring that data is deleted at the end of its useful life. While some users said they delete everything after a set period of time, others said that their data often sits in vaults, requiring fees and a migration to newer tape technology over time.

Schwimmer said that Northrop Grumman's deletion policy requires everything to go after 10 years.