March 21st is marked as Digital Cleanup Day, dedicated to cleaning up our digital lives. Now into its sixth year, and organised by Let’s Do It World, Digital Cleanup Day is aimed at raising awareness about digital pollution, encouraging individuals and companies to declutter and restructure their online presence.

Whilst Digital Cleanup Day typically highlights the environmental impact of digital technology and the need for more responsible digital habits, credential clutter plays a large part in the problem. Dormant accounts, duplicated identities and outdated authentication systems all sit within sprawling IT estates that consume energy, increase cloud consumption, require ongoing infrastructure support and add unnecessary complexity. A cleaner access and identity environment will not just be more secure, but it will be more efficient, and ultimately, more sustainable.

However, as part of this, businesses should ensure they understand what is being removed. Data discovery is an important step to enabling organisations identify where their data resides, what it contains and how it is being used. Without that visibility, businesses risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater and potentially discarding valuable information that could drive organisational insight and growth.

For organisations considering how to address these digital habits, streamlining access, removing unused credentials, and modernising authentication practices reduces the operational overhead associated with maintaining legacy systems and recovering from avoidable breaches.

By combining strong access management hygiene with effective data discovery as part of a responsible digital cleanup strategy, businesses can align resilience and sustainability while ensuring they remain on top of basic security and compliance best practice.