Information access technologies should come before more storage

“The current explosion of information is outpacing the decline in storage prices, even before the resource costs for maintaining data are taken into account,” explains Whit Andrews, vice president at Gartner. “This makes it a very good time for enterprises to streamline and modernise their information and access systems by identifying redundant information and eliminating applications retained to handle this.” Andrews believes that information access and so-called content valuation technologies can help manufacturers to reduce the amount of data they hold in both primary and secondary storage, while also helping them to identify information kept in primary storage that can safely be moved down. “License costs for mature, reliable products range from $10,000 for small deployments to $3 million or more for advanced applications, and there are annual maintenance fees of about 18%,”says Andrews. “However, many enterprises will use an already-installed search platform for cleaning up legacy information, and benefits will still accrue if they have to buy new information access technology.” He suggests that with information access technology, companies that previously decided to keep information based on intuitive judgments, can now be more scientific and use criticality and relevance criteria instead. “Improved judgments are extremely valuable for shared storage and could also be useful for personal storage,” says Andrews.