Archive for July, 2008

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in a meeting where the issue of storage costs comes up. What always surprises me is the laissez-faire attitude toward storage costs…”Storage is cheap and getting cheaper” some businessperson will say. And, for the most part, everyone else just nods their heads. It’s the easy way to dodge a tough issue. Who wants to argue with the truth; in fact, the per GB cost of storage is decreasing and will continue to do so. But, what no one talks about is that the amount of information being created that needs to be stored is growing exponentially, and probably at a larger clip than the decrease in storage costs. Thus, in relative terms, the cost of storing information continues to be the same, if not more, despite lower storage costs - especially for all those organizations still sadly stuck in the “retain everything” mode.

After two years, requested records must be delivered in a ‘reasonable period of time.’ In fact, NI 31-103 requires firms to keep some records for seven years after the departure of a client.” Wow - sounds eerily similar the US’s FRCPs.

During my industry analyst days, I got some perfunctory inquiries on hosted vs. on-premise email archiving. There was clearly some interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS), but there wasn’t much of a debate - on-premise archiving was the way to go for 85% of clients. Why? Mainly because they wanted mailbox management for end-user access to email, fast query times for eDiscovery, and the ability to customize the software to their specific needs.

Years ago, those of us in the information management industry used to argue about whether best-of-breed solutions for web content management, document management, records management, and document imaging were better than enterprise content management (ECM) suites. After lots of consolidation, it would appear that the “suite” approach won, but the reality is that most organizations still use best-of-breed products (even if they bought a full ECM suite). Sometimes, bigger isn’t always better.