Gartner Research points to the exploding amounts of digital data in the enterprise and warns CIOs to first consider options to control and manage data before overspending on huge amounts of storage. Many CIOs point to the rapidly falling prices in storage as an easy solution, but even with dropping prices, Gartner thinks CIOs won’t be able to keep pace with demand.
“The current explosion of information is outpacing the decline in storage prices even before the resource costs for maintaining data are taken into account,” says Whit Andrews, vice-president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “This makes it a very good time for organisations to streamline and modernise their information and access systems by identifying redundant information and eliminating applications retained to handle this.”
With Content and Information management systems, enterprises can manage the lifecycle of data, eliminating data no longer needed or duplicated. These systems can reduce the amount of data that needs to be retained on expensive primary storage media and be able to identify which data can be moved to secondary storage. Some of these systems also try to assign a relative value to a piece of information which is derived from variables like the data creator, usage patterns and the nature of the content and business purpose.
Gartner finds that despite the costs of content and information management systems, taking into account both their license and maintenance fees, that these systems ultimately pay for themselves.
