Enterprise information management spending surpasses $1 trillion annually

Global business spending on digital information management has surpassed $1 trillion per year, as companies of all sizes deal with more data than ever before, according to a recent survey by Symantec.

The study, which polled more than 4,500 organizations with five to 5,000 employees, showed data rates reach about 2.2 zettabytes annually. Small and medium-sized businesses produce an average of 563 terabytes each year, while large enterprises can expect as much as 100,000 terabytes.

Respondents said their digital information records account for approximately 49 percent of their business' value.

For many organizations, managing information is a matter of understanding the different types of data they create and properly sorting it based on value. Sean Kopelke, the Pacific region director of specialist solutions for Symantec, told ITWire that this helps an organization know what to store, what to destroy and where to apply deduplication and other management tools. Additionally, these steps help improve backup and recovery efforts and overall management of operations.

One factor driving up costs for most businesses is under-utilizing storage space. This can come from purchasing too much space, or not properly making use of available space. According to the study, 43 percent of data that businesses are putting into storage is duplicates of information that was previously backed up. Enterprise content management solutions can help solve this issue and make better use of storage space, while assisting a business with improving its overall archiving policies.

Lowering the cost of digital information management and storage doesn't necessarily mean reducing the quality of these solutions, but simply making better use of them and related services. By making these systems more efficient and flexible, an organization can not only lower the cost of their management solution, but also better protect their data as well.

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