Data volumes are growing - a fact we all appreciate as data growth doubles our year on year. Adding to this increase, are business practises that require companies to store data for longer and some time indefinitely such as data mining, trend analysis and regulatory compliance.

As disc space becomes a commodity with costs plummeting, companies frequently turn to a short term solutions by purchasing yet more hardware. On the face of it, this would seem to be a cost effective cure to a common complaint, but the cost of managing and powering this mounting hardware is too often overlooked. Indeed, as power costs rise and space comes at a premium, this cost can outweigh the value of the actual data.

Industry analysts say that for every £1 we spend on hardware an additional £9 is spent on managing it throughout its lifecycle.

The real issue is when was the data was last accessed? Statistics have shown that 50-70% of what is backed up will not have been accessed in the preceding 6 weeks.

Storing and protection of data ensures you as an IT team are doing your job, but are you allowing your business to make the most of that stored data? By correctly managing that data, recording its whereabouts and indexing its contents we are able to show you how huge volumes of data can be easily accessed and used constrictively to accelerate products to market, analyse market trends or protect against litigation.