Active archiving of information will become more prominent in businesses as shifts in technology enable more comprehensive and additional content, IDC has predicted.
The main drivers will be compliance with record retention laws, improving the efficiency and accuracy of legal e-discovery and achieving overall IT optimisation gains.
However, companies are more interested in broader information management systems than simple archiving products, the analyst firm claimed in a recent report.
“The initiatives driving active archiving spending are more about information management than about archiving, although archiving may be a technology that is used to achieve policy objectives,” said Laura DuBois, programme director for storage software at IDC. “Projects form around information management, records management and electronic discovery.”
“Archiving is a priority for the midsize to the largest firms,” said Vivian Tero, research manager for compliance infrastructure at IDC. “However, larger firms view archiving in the broader context of information management, in particular for non-technical stakeholders. The far greater opportunity for suppliers is in providing a larger information management portfolio of solutions rather than just providing a solution for archiving.”
Future archiving technology will need to address a broad spectrum of content types, initially more unstructured than structured content, the company said.
Its research also suggested the role of legal e-discovery in archiving purchases is important across firms of all sizes because it presents the greatest risk and potential disruption to firms.
By Niall Byrne
