Issue #0640/3 - Legislation requires that organisations not only keep data for many years but are also able to produce it on demand. This drives the requirement for storage systems and a new approach to document archiving.
Responding to the requirement to comply with new data retention legislation, combined with a desire by organisations to improve business intelligence, not to mention the increasing size of many document files, is leading to a meteoric rise in the demand for storage systems.
Subsidiary to these major drivers lie two additional motivators – the desire to reduce reliance on space-hungry hard copy documents and archiving systems and a desire to achieve a level of sustainability previously unobtainable. With sustainability regularly hitting the headlines as one of the buzz-words of the age, organisations must consider all means of improving their position.
Needless to say, this is also all wrapped up in the ongoing demand for service levels to be improved and operating costs reduced.
To take the example of a national bank with 22 million customers, a project has been under way this year to virtualise its storage to cut IT costs and also to allow it to allocate storage across the bank more easily.
However, the project currently requires 1.7 petabytes of storage and this is estimated to be growing at an annual rate of more than 60%. The bank requires 700 terabytes of storage just to support its 1,000 servers and is expected to require a quadrupling of network bandwidth to handle this storage centralisation project.
From the regulatory angle, the situation is even more complex for multi-nationals that have to comply with regulations in every country they play in, not just their HQ location, creating demand for huge quantities of digital storage.
Thankfully, cost of storage has reduced significantly over the years but in terms of percentage of IT budgets, storage is now said to be accounting for around three-times the IT spend of five years ago. Estimates put storage spend as high as 30-40% of IT budget.
Digital archiving improves an organisation’s efficiency, reduces archive retrieval times and reduces cost of space by freeing up space previously allocated to hard copy archiving – not to mention saving printing costs because documents can be archived directly from the workers’ workstations instead of needing to be printed for archiving.
Most major printer manufacturers, and especially those specialising in MFPs as well as printers, have a document management system in their portfolio and are actively working on the efficiency issues. But, they cannot afford to play at Document Management. It has to be an all-out drive to eliminate as much paper as possible or customers will switch loyalties to suppliers with more robust systems.
For their part, organisations will need to be prepared for an ongoing investment program in expanded storage systems to handle the increasing demands of data storage, whether this is caused by the drive for efficiency and cost reduction or by the need to comply with data security and accessibility regulations.
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