Ad-Hoc Information and Intellectual Property: The Need for Management and Archival

• The growth of ad-hoc information within organisations continues to grow
  Organisations are creating more and more information, the majority of which will never hit a formal storage system. Simply managing the growth of file server and email storage systems is taxing the majority of organisations. Effectively mining the value of such information is proving even harder.
• The corporate importance of email and file storage is growing exponentially
  Most organisations find that email is now being utilised as a form of information back up for many employees. Although the stateless capabilities of email servers means that this is technically an effective approach, the impact on storage volumes of having multiple copies of documents held on file servers and across multiple email storage systems is immense.
• Both legal and organisational compliance needs are driving a requirement for better ad-hoc information management
  Legal needs for process auditing, information tracking and disclosure are growing and changing constantly. Without the capability to keep track of ad-hoc information, an organisation’s capabilities to demonstrate compliance will be effectively lost.
• Organisational decision making is essentially impossible where the majority of information cannot be easily accessed
  Making decisions against a sub-set of information is dangerous, yet most organisations can only effectively report against information held in formalised storage systems, such as databases and document management systems.
• In the majority of cases, storage resources are woefully under utilised
  Having dedicated storage systems for specific applications can lead to utilisation levels of less than 30% on storage systems.
• Tooling is required that creates a virtualised storage resource pool
  By choosing the right storage management environment, storage can be virtualised and logically partitioned to provide a highly flexible environment that is far more responsive to the organisation’s needs and can provide more efficient means of utilising storage resources.
• Flexibility and usability are key requirements
  The tooling chosen must be easy to implement, must be inclusive in its support of existing and future storage hardware and must provide interfaces that are easy to use for both end users and technical staff alike.

Conclusions
Ad-hoc information stores have historically been overlooked by organisations which have regarded simple back up and restore capabilities as being sufficient for business’ needs. However, both internal and external pressures have been growing to make it that such stores have inherent value to the company, and that control must be exercised over the stores so that the full commercial value can be more easily uncovered and made available to enable better decision making.

 1. Introduction
Organisations started to store files centrally to get around the problem of unreliable client devices losing information on failure. By centralising ad-hoc (i.e. unstructured, as in reports, emails and other files) information storage in the same way as more formal (i.e. structured, as in data held within a database) data, better control could be applied to back up and restore, with the added benefits of better security and greater corporate visibility of information. At the same time, email, which had started out as a basic means of exchanging information with others, rapidly grew to become a major form of collaboration and communication between people within an organisation. Today, email usage has spread outside the organisation to include suppliers and customers, and often comprises the exchange of a mix of formal and less formal information. Indeed, research by Quocirca has shown that email is one of the most utilised methods of carrying out transactions between businesses.
However, as the quantity of ad-hoc information has grown, the capability to effectively manage it has diminished, whilst the value of the intellectual property held in such files has exploded. That information now has to be stored for longer periods of time is compounding a problem that is just growing for the majority of organisations. Very few companies have a cohesive approach to dealing with ad-hoc data, splitting the management of files and email as if these two areas were completely separate.
Indeed, the overall business problem is often made worse as organisations try to address the problem – the capability for information exploitation is impaired, as the separate silos of information resources are further broken down into on-line, near-line and off-line silos, with few points of interaction between them.