Astute risk management defines success in the insurance industry. Premiums charged to the company's customers reflect that relation of risk to profit, while the riskiest ventures are avoided entirely. Translating risk to the IT world would likely bring security software solutions to mind. Endpoints, NAC, messaging, etc, all come with inherent risks. Not managing those risks can result in data loss, corporate espionage, and other nasty events.

It may come as a surprise that file fragmentation can be risky business too. Fragmentation creates many more unattractive side effects than a slow computer.

The insurance policyholder who smokes is a higher risk than the one who does not, and subsequently they pay a higher premium.

What about hard drives? The hard drives that have to work harder due to fragmentation are also at higher risk. They, too, come at a higher cost – more help desk calls. Part of the long-term ramifications of file fragmentation is more and unnecessary I/O activity over the drive's life – wearing it out faster.

A recent study was done by the Parallel Data Laboratories at Carnegie Mellon titled "Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?" MTTF is the acronym used for Mean Time To Failure. The report made note of annual disk replacement rates being 1-4% (common), all the way up to 13% on some systems. With this data being a higher rate than MTTF, this suggested that disk replacement is a different process than would be predicted by the MTTF numbers. The authors also noted in their study done on a population of over 100,000 drives that based on their studies of disk replacements, failure rate was not constant with the age of the disk. Rather, there is a mortality effect with a wear-out degradation. They found that replacement rates grew constantly with age—and this was an effect that was originally thought not to set in until after a hard disk lifetime of 5 years.

On-site visits by IT staff to a user's workspace due to hardware problems incur significant cost. With research showing that hard drives rival the power supply as the "most-replaced" component in a computer, solutions applied to minimize those replacements can save the company significant hardware costs and IT repair overhead.

It's fairly well known that defragmented files mean faster file writes and retrievals. However, file fragmentation, if not handled, will build up to the point that reliability is jeopardized. Managing risk is the key to survival in the Insurance industry, and those same concepts can be carried over to IT.

The reliability of third party applications is highly dependent on the degree to which those applications can accommodate bottlenecks, such as in disk subsystems.

Handling fragmentation is an excellent way to mitigate performance and reliability risks. Handling fragmentation on all computers is the ideal approach to eliminating the IT overhead of slow or unreliable computers (fragmentation related) entirely. Allstate has been defragmenting all their computers with an automatic defrag software for close to a decade now. Automating defragmentation has removed the chore from the IT department and allowed them to focus on the future.