Every system collects stale data over time — that part is obvious. What’s less obvious is how much of it your platform will accumulate and, more importantly, whether it builds up in places it never should. That’s no longer just an operational issue but an architectural one.
In my experience, I’ve often found stale data hiding in corners nobody thinks about. On the surface, they look harmless, but over time, they start shaping system behavior in ways that are hard to ignore. And it’s not just a rare edge case: studies show that, on average, more than half of all organizational data ends up stale. That means the risks are not occasional but systemic, quietly spreading across critical parts of the platform.