Organisations should ensure they maintain archiving,
search and discovery technologies to cope with a steep rise in
volumes of digital information, analysts have advised.
A report published by research company
IDC last week found that 161
exabytes (billions of gigabytes) of digital information was created
last year.
The EMC-sponsored report also highlighted that, although
individuals generated nearly 70% of this digital content,
organisations were responsible for the security, privacy,
reliability and compliance of at least 85% of the data.
IDC predicted a six-fold annual increase in the amount of
information created through multimedia and productivity
applications, including video, work files, e-mails and instant
messages between 2006 and 2010. It said data volumes would surge to
a total of 988 exabytes, with a compound annual growth rate of 57%,
by the end of this period.
Dale Vile, research director at analyst firm Freeform Dynamics,
said that exponential data growth was an accepted part of
maintaining storage systems and IT directors needed a strategy to
deal with it.
"The key thing is to figure out what is and isn't important to
keep, and there are lots of technology suppliers out there who have
solved the problem of how to do this technologically," he said.
"The biggest problem is that many people are drowning in
information that is made up of unstructured data."
The IDC report estimated that less than 10% of organisational
information is classified or ranked according to value. However, it
expects that amount to grow by more than 50% a year.
"It is absolutely critical to classify your data and use
metadata and tagging technologies along with enterprise search and
discovery technologies to navigate through what you need to keep
and find again," said Vile.
Download the IDC report
The Expanding
Digital Universe: Worldwide Information Growth Through
2010
Storage predictions for 2007
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