It's boom time for info management

It's a deluge of information today. The amount of digital information consumed globally in 2006 alone, if stacked as books, can go to and fro from the sun 18 times. Research firm IDC projects this figure will grow almost six times by 2010, representing an annual growth of 57 per cent.

In India, the situation is no different. It's no surprise then that the information management market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 15.1 per cent till 2010 and is said to be the fastest growing sector in IT. This is evident from the fact that storage infrastructure and solutions constitute about 20 per cent of a customer's expenditure on IT infrastructure.

"Even though, the India storage market at $300 million constitutes a very small part of it, considering large scale enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI) and customer relationship management (CRM) implementations by Indian businesses, this is expected to outpace many other developed countries," opines Manoj Chugh of EMC Data Storage Systems.

The need for a proper information (data) management mechanism is driven by the fact that digital data, in its original form, is now recognised as an evidence as per the Indian IT Act, 2000. Digitised information includes both structured and unstructured (like emails, images, video, files, MRI scan, x-ray and others) information.

"A good number of Indian companies have raised ADRs on the US stock exchange and will have to adhere to eDiscovery and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Since most Indian companies are making global acquisitions, they need to adhere to the local laws and regulations in addition to the Indian laws," says Anand Naik, Director -- System Engineering, Symantec India and SAARC.

Adds Pavan Duggal, a cyber law expert and advocate, Supreme Court: "Multiple regulations today define and govern the way business is done worldwide. Fines, penalties, and worst of all, loss of reputation for non-compliance, are driving companies to address compliance as a serious issue."

"As more and more business operations are recorded and stored digitally, the thicket of laws and regulations governing businesses and data has become denser, and the consequences for failing to comply with these regulations have become more severe," said Soumitra Agarwal, Marketing Director, NetApp India.

As for the storage solutions, over the last three years, Indian enterprises are moving from direct-attached storage (storage connected to the computer) to network storage which helps multiple platforms to share information using technologies like SAN (storage area network), NAS (network attached storage) or CAS (content addressed storage).