Jerry McElhatton, president of global technology and operations at MasterCard International in Purchase, N.Y., was able to unearth and remove redundant pieces of data, thus freeing up storage capacity. "When you grow storage on an application rather than companywide basis, you end up with databases with a lot of the same content on them," says McElhatton. A data inventory will flush out the redundant content, and "then you can put it into a single file and let that one data component serve all the people who need it," he adds.

2 Try new management tools You never know what you’ll find

George Medairy, director of corporate IT at Sheetz, a convenience store company based in Altoona, Pa., discovered a Computer Associates product called Brightstor "bundled in with stuff we already had." He’s found it very useful in automating certain data management tasks such as monitoring storage tapes. "It’s really helped us, and we didn’t have to go looking for a product to do this job," he says.

3 Evaluate data backup and business continuity needs You never know what you’ll discover

Bill Gearhart, director of IT at Rinker Materials, a construction materials manufacturer in West Palm Beach, Fla., with annual revenue of more than $2 billion, recently redid his disaster recovery plan and discovered that he was neglecting some important data. Bringing e-mail up wasn’t a huge priority with the old plan. But since many people need the system for communication?and for storing business-critical information?Gearhart says that e-mail recovery has vaulted to the top of his company’s disaster recovery list.