Unstructured Data Driving CIO Focus To Archival Solns

EMC has announced the results of the IDG Mindtrack survey on information infrastructure priorities within the Indian CIO community. The survey draws upon the experience and feedback of 148 CIOs polled from organisations across different industry verticals. The results of the study reaffirm the need for information management solutions that will mitigate the challenges associated with the exploding digital data universe.

The digital universe, according to EMC is getting bigger and growing more rapidly as a result of accelerated growth in the use of digital cameras, Web 2.0 technologies, SMS, streaming multimedia and other sources of digital information. In March 2008, an EMC-sponsored report by IDC had forecasted a ten-fold increase in the digital universe from 180 exabytes (1 billion gigabyte = 1 exabyte) in 2006 to 1800 exabytes in 2011 as a result of this accelerated growth. The Mindtrack survey revealed that this increase in unstructured data versus the availability of storage is driving corporate investments in storage virtualisation, information lifecycle management and back-up/ archival technologies, with the latter receiving the most attention.

The study revealed that close to 80 percent of the data within organisations is either partially or completely unstructured with only a fraction of the employees having complete access to structured data. In the current economic climate, interfacing with customers and increasing customer loyalty is at once, an extremely critical function and the hardest job in an organisation. As was found in the survey, a majority of CIOs are firmly convinced that enterprise-wide information management strategy is important, if not critical, for the success of their businesses. CIOs, however, are divided on the issue of whether or not there are benefits to heterogeneous storage architecture.

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As business relevant information becomes a critical component of any organisation’s success, technologies and solutions that secure this vital asset are receiving increased attention and investment. The results of the security survey shows that more than half of CIOs surveyed will increase their security budgets in the range of 10-30 percent to combat rising theft and leakage of intellectual property and financial information. In a bid to understand and get an unbiased assessment of their security credentials, a large majority of those surveyed will be outsourcing their risk assessment and security audit functions to a trusted technology partner.

“The survey shows us that companies must adopt an information-centric approach to securing their vital digital assets. We at RSA, the security division of EMC, have always advocated a risk-based security strategy to safeguard assets,” said Amuleek Bijral, country manager, India and SAARC at RSA.