Massive data creation drives storage needs

Jonathan de Magalhães, Symantec availability product manager at Faritec, explains: "According to Symantec reports, about 75% of a company`s intellectual property is contained within their e-mail system."

And, what`s more, e-mail is not simply text - it incorporates spreadsheets, disclaimer information, signatures, images, and sound files.

A recent EMC-sponsored IDC study expected 988 billion gigabytes of digital information to be created by 2010. In 2006, the study says, the 2006 digital universe was 161 billion gigabytes (161 exabytes) in size.

It states: "While nearly 70% of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, most of this content will be touched by an organisation along the way - on a network, in a data centre, at a hosting site, at a telephone or Internet switch, or in a backup system. Organisations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85% of the information."

What does this mean? Well, the biggest issue is that all of this information will have a major impact on organisational infrastructure. It is no longer enough to simply buy more storage space - in a few years, the infrastructure will crumble under the weight.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

According to Sheldon Hand, pre-sales manager at Symantec, a good move is to create an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy to drive down costs. "It is important to classify the value of info. For example, the lower tiers cost less and should therefore contain less-important information," he says. "Assess your information so that if it loses value, it must move to a lower tier."

He describes ILM as being a framework that includes input from business, process and external sources, such as government and regulators. Although classification engines can be set up to make the job easier, there is still human intervention necessary to make it work.

"There are two approaches: the auto-classification engine which is based on policy. And the user-classification engine where the user is given the ability to manually classify information," he explains. "Organisations will need counts of both. What isn`t automatically defined, the user defines."

According to Gerrie Terblanche, CEO of DeltaLink Consulting, the first step is to secure your information through archiving. "Most of this mass of digital information is of an unstructured nature which poses unique challenges to companies. Management often underestimates the extent and importance of this information and they are of the opinion that backing up this information represents adequate management thereof."

SECURITY VS STORAGE

An increasingly important aspect of storage is security. Since the merger between Symantec and Veritas, many security and storage companies have followed suit.

De Magalhães says: "Traditionally, the tasks of managing storage and securing the corporate have been handled by different entities within a company, as they initially seem to be unrelated. However, organisations realise that information is the life-blood of their company, and the necessity of ensuring that it can be trusted is essential to perform business transactions, make accurate decisions, as well as maintain corporate governance."

He also believes that having a single team manage both the storage and security provides many benefits, especially in ensuring the integrity of the data being managed.

Hand says: "The challenge here is that a connection exists between the network and the server, and this can easily lead to security breaches. It`s about keeping the bad things (threats) out and the good things in."

NOT THE SAME?

Sagaran Naidoo, business technologist at CA, believes that storage and risk management are often misunderstood and are a much broader concept than most people realise, especially when it come to regulatory compliance.

"What it comes down to is the ability to access information when you need it," he says. "Morgan Stanley got a $1.5 billion lawsuit due to not being able to produce an e-mail in time." He, like Terblanche, believes that archiving is the first step. "The second step is to manage information in the archiving stage, and finally, to make it easily accessible in a time of need."

According to Garth Wittles, SA country manager for Mimecast: "Compliance has to do with how e-mail is sent and received, not just how it is stored, and in some cases, data needs to be used as evidence."

He believes the solution is for companies to keep their data off-site as this guarantees availability. "Especially in a country where power failures are such an issue," he says.

Says Peter Bauer, worldwide CEO of Mimecast. "E-mails have highly technical best practices." He explains that new clients often bring with them the legacy of bad practices.

SOLUTIONS FOR THE SME

With so much to digest - policies, regulations, and security aspects - what is an SME to do? How cost-effective are some of these solutions for the smaller players?

"Large-scale ECM systems are expensive and in addition can be overwhelming for SMEs with smaller IT shops and limited resources," says Terblanche.

Naidoo believes that SMEs have the same problems as larger corporates (such as business continuity) but they only realise this when they have a disaster. It can often lead to them going out of business.

"SMEs need a business continuity plan," he advises. "They really suffer when there is a disaster."

De Magalh es explains: "Storage options targeted for SMEs include disk arrays and tape libraries with lower capacities, but that are designed to scale seamlessly for growth. There are also software solutions that offer investment protection and upgrade paths to more feature-rich software."

NOT SO EASY

Although SMEs are not the only ones with problems - the nature of the industry brings with it many challenges.

"A big challenge is the distributed nature of e-mail documents," explains Hand. "And, of course, bandwidth constraints."

Bauer believes there to be a challenge with regards to responsibility. "The IT professional is never responsible on his own," he says. "We need to be able to guarantee that we can find information in seven years` time in a mass of data. The IT techie has never before had to think of monitoring, securing and compliance of data in a searchable format."

THE CRYSTAL BALL

De Magalh es says: "One of the biggest current trends is around tiered storage, and this addresses both managing the primary storage as well as looking at concepts such as archiving. Although definitely not a new trend, tiered storage management is the next level of Information Lifecycle Management." Hand says: "The will be a big drive towards eliminating duplicate information. There has also been a recent increase in e-mail archiving uptake among legal firms."

Naidoo believes there will be an increased uptake of records management. "Not only for operations, but for legislative needs."

Recovery management is also becoming more urgent, he says. "We are moving from tape-disk backup to continuous backup. We need to be able to recover in minutes, not hours, days or weeks."