Facebook has no idea where they store your data. In a hearing, two senior Facebook employees admitted that they couldn’t say where user data was stored, much less ensure that it was all turned over to the authorities or deleted if required. The investigator said, “surely someone must have a diagram?” The engineers replied, “no, the code is its own documentation.”
The second law of thermodynamics applies to IT systems just like it applies to the rest of the world. It says that the amount of entropy, or disorder, inexorably increases unless someone spends energy actively trying to diminish it.
That becomes a problem when nobody spends time refactoring or cleaning up but lots of time adding new features, integrations, and dependencies. More than half of all organizations are where Facebook is: They don’t have and cannot establish the full picture of how their systems work. That places them at risk of catastrophic and irrecoverable failure. Can you establish a complete overview of your systems?