Digital Archiving: End-User Survey & Market Forecast 2006-2010

With this report, ESG continues a line of research that began with the 2002 research report Reference Information: The Next Wave and the 2003 report Compliance: The Effect on Information Management and the Storage Industry. In those previous reports, ESG identified, defined, and measured important emerging trends related to the retention, management, and effective use of different types of electronic records and other digital assets, whether for business, regulatory, or legal purposes. While this earlier ESG research focused primarily on what constituted new categories of information such as "reference information" and "compliant records," they did not address critical - and in many cases, unresolved - issues as to how end-users are fundamentally managing and will continue to manage the long-term retention of their digital assets, whether from a technology, process, or organization perspective.

The desire to understand these issues provided the primary motivation for this report. Specifically, this report looks to answer the following questions:

• What are users' deployment plans for specialized digital archiving applications? How do those plans vary by organization size, industry, and content type?
• To what extent are archiving initiatives driven by considerations such as regulatory compliance, litigation support, IT efficiency, and business process improvement?
• What is the relationship between digital archiving and other data protection processes?
• How do end-users fundamentally define "archiving" and the archive process - and how do they define archiving in relation to other data management and protection processes?
• Which product features are most important to users when it comes to digital archiving applications?
• What storage architectures and systems are being used and will be used to archive data?
• What are the key organizational dynamics associated with digital archiving?
• Who makes or influences purchasing decisions? From what budgets are digital archiving purchases typically funded?
• From what sources are users looking to purchase digital archiving products, solutions, and services?
• How will users secure digital archives?
• How interested are users in outsourcing their digital archiving processes to external service providers?
• How much archived capacity is currently associated with various digital archiving solutions - and how will the total volume of archived capacity grow over the next five years?

To answer these questions, ESG conducted a comprehensive survey of 568 IT, business, and records management professionals at North American public- and private-sector organizations, conducted 28 in-depth interviews with a subset of these respondents, and constructed a detailed market model to measure and forecast worldwide digital archive capacity.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

Executive Summary