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Man has long felt the need to preserve the results of human activity in various physical forms including documents, books, photographs and paintings. The concept of an archive, starting possibly as far back as cave paintings, has evolved in modern times to identify, preserve and share those historical records.
What we have learned about preserving our output is being applied to organisational data in digital form and it has become a difficult problem with data growing at an exponential rate. But solving this problem is critical because this structured and unstructured data has become an integral part of the way we do business.
A recent study by Gartner Group identified that the three key business issues concerning CIO's are: cost/budget pressures, data security concerns, and the need for faster innovation. These issues have been further complicated with emerging regulations relating to the management of corporate information. You can no longer -just delete" old information, compounding cost/budget pressures and data security concerns within already stretched IT environments.
The changing nature of our information is also exacerbating these pressures. For organisations to confront this situation, they need to first understand the nature of their data and its economic value so a strategy can be developed that is in line with the company's business model. Data can be defined into three categories -- structured, semi-structure and unstructured.
The traditional definition of structured data is that which is organised by the well-defined structure provided by databases. Database sizes are growing so fast that it is impeding application performance, stretching backup windows and artificially inflating the total cost of operations. Unstructured data is typically comprised of documents, spreadsheets, graphics, still and motion images (rich media) and a variety of other formats. The semi-structured classification applies to messages including e-mail and other electronic forms and often serves to provide an organisational framework for unstructured file attachments. It is estimated that up to 50 percent of data residing in data centres fall into these last two categories.
Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), a storage-centric research company based in the United States, found there is a sea change occurring in the structure of information, a trend that ESG expects to accelerate over the next several years. Reference Information, defined as a digital asset retained for active reference and value, will become the primary form of information currency. Reference Information will become, once organisations harness and leverage it, enormously valuable. The problem is, that unlike Transactional Information (databases information, textual or -flat" information), Reference Information is either unstructured or semi-structured in nature and dispersed across an organisation.
With the growth of e-mail usage and the digitisation of business information, this unstructured data comprising documents, spreadsheets, graphics and rich media is now overshadowing the growth of structured data and creating significant problems to companies grappling with storage capacities. More and more information generated by business activity is outside the structured bounds and retrieval mechanisms of databases, pushing the need to quickly catalogue, search, retrieve and replace this unstructured data out into the storage environment itself.
The importance of e-mail to an organisation and recent world events, such as the Enron scandal and the increased risk of terrorism, has translated to the need for not just more hardware but even new regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II. This complicates the situation further as organisations are required to retain e-mail files for a proscribed period of time -- potentially indefinitely -- to comply with these types of regulations. Although there is no similar legislation in Australia presently for corporations, the future Corporations Act is likely to be revised to address these disclosure requirements. However, we are beginning to see state government legislation targeting information security and business continuity across departments.
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