Storage technologies that specifically target the efficient storage of unstructured data are increasingly becoming important components of Document and Record Management solutions.
The new solutions typically incorporate Tiered-storage. Tiered-storage offers a cost-effective way to balance storage costs against retrieval speeds., and it becomes even more effective when paired with an Automatic Data Classification strategy for identifying document and file relevancy and then, based on an organization’s business rules, moving documents to the most appropriate location. The combination of the tiered-storage with automatic data classification provides a very cost effective technique for storing data.
Organizations tasked with regulatory compliance and e-Discovery requests are finding that Automatic Data Classification can be a big help. Being able to find and retrieve specific pieces of information in a short period of time without proper data classification and good search tools can be an impossible task.
Many vendors are offering a variety of approaches and algorithms related to the Automatic Data Classification problem. Approaches can vary as to whether inspect data at either the block or the file level.
Some systems will classify data as it is created, while others schedule periodic background data classification jobs to run on the back-end, processing any new data entered since the last time the process ran.
The number of storage vendors doing automatic data classification is large and includes Arkivio, Kazeon, Njini, and StoredIQ. This segment of the market is being called Information Classification and Management (ICM) and is growing quickly.
