Active Archiving to Become More Integral to Information Management Initiatives, According to IDC

Active archiving approaches, long directed at email, are becoming more comprehensive and including additional content, starting first with other unstructured information. Archiving will become more integral to information management initiatives, particularly for larger organizations, and non-technology stakeholders will continue to play a large role in purchasing decisions, a new IDC multi-client study reveals.

"The initiatives driving active archiving spending are more about information management than about archiving, although archiving may be a technology that is used to achieve policy objectives," said Laura DuBois, program director for Storage Software at IDC. "Projects form around information management, records management, and electronic discovery."

"Archiving is a priority for midsize to the largest firms," added Vivian Tero, research manager, for Compliance Infrastructure at IDC. "However, larger firms view archiving in the broader context of information management, in particular for non-technical stakeholders. The far greater opportunity for suppliers is in providing a larger information management portfolio of solutions rather than just providing a solution for archiving."

Other key findings from the study include the following:

• The drivers for archiving will continue to include compliance with record retention requirements, improving the efficiency and accuracy of ediscovery, and achieving overall IT optimization gains.
• Information reuse is a sophisticated sell. Leveraging information in an archive for innovation, new product development, or improved customer service aligns with business unit or C-level executive objectives.
• Future archiving solutions need to address a broad spectrum of content types, initially more unstructured than structured content.
• The role of ediscovery in archiving purchases is important across firms of all sizes because it presents the greatest risk, disruption, and unknown to the firm.