Among the many things that this decade will be known for, perhaps the most unanticipated is the unprecedented explosion of the digital universe. The IDC 2008 report 'The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe' concluded that the amount of digital information produced by the world in the year 2011 will reach 1,800 exabytes, or 10 times higher than that produced in 2006, 95 per cent of it being unstructured.

Propelled by the digitization of documents, pictures and videos, by individuals and organizations, the digital universe is expanding exponentially and haphazardly. The shift from physical to digital has also been accompanied by a parallel increase in the personal digital information footprint or 'digital echo'.

Along with the huge volume of organizational data, the proliferation of groups of data by individuals, specific work groups, etc, also creates redundant and duplicate information repositories, adding to the confusion with huge cost implications as well.

Corporations will ultimately be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of over 85 per cent of all this information, despite the fact that over 75 per cent of it will be created by individuals.

For businesses competing in a competitive global economy, this is both a challenge and a priority – to effectively manage their greatest asset, information and capitalize on it. Organizational IT strategy going forward will increasingly have to center around comprehensive information management, built around an integrated information infrastructure and strong information governance protocols.

The broad challenges in information management are spread across managing information growth, managing risk, managing effectiveness and creating value from information.

Given the size and complexity of information at enterprise levels, organizations will require new information management tools, standards and an information infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable, and scalable to manage exponential growth. This includes storage optimization, unstructured data search, and database analytics to resource pooling, management and security tools.

The information that organizations generate, collect and manage sometimes carries substantial risks as well. The risks relate to privacy, unauthorized access, information theft/loss and compliance with various legal mandates, all with strong business impact. Hence, the development of organization-wide information governance policies or Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) measures, to regulate the access and distribution of information within and outside organizations, is a critical need.

Disaster recovery, based on back-up, recovery and archival systems, is another important aspect of the information infrastructure paradigm. It is crucial to the continuity and viability of an organization and has powerful business relevance.

Information compatibility, due to varying sources of information and making information intelligent, to enable efficient storage and retrieval is an inevitable requirement. Tools such as Web 2.0 technologies and Terabyte drives, unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web are proving invaluable in helping manage this diverse digital universe.

In the end, the true test of the information management infrastructure will lie in its capability to generate new ways of leveraging the information to create value and drive business. Keeping a firm hold on capital and operational expenditure, while ensuring the required flexibility and responsiveness, are equally crucial imperatives.

Then there is also the impact of this digital information explosion on the environment which is considerable and measurable, particularly in terms of power consumed and electronic waste generated. With the growing recognition and importance of sustainable business practices, the green aspect in planning an organization's information technology infrastructure has never been more relevant.

New Technologies Altering Information Management Landscape

Even as organizations plan their technology investments around information as an asset, developments such as flash drives, thin provisioning, tiered storage, data de-duplication, virtualization and cloud computing are set to alter the information management landscape.

Virtualization has shown a way to fully exploit information infrastructure investments and ensure maximum ROI, while playing an ideal foil to the needs of the expanding information universe. At the simplest level, it is creating more space and improving efficiencies through optimization of existing computing and storage infrastructure. Thin provisioning or virtual provisioning allows storage systems to present an application with more capacity than is physically allocated to it in the storage array. This along with data de-duplication helps in more efficient and better utilized storage.

Storage tiering helps customers optimize their environments by storing information on the right platform at the right cost point. Flash drives represent game changing technology that will reinvent the storage industry and alter the future of tiered storage. Flash drives provide low latency, low power consumption, high throughput with performances which are orders of magnitude faster than the traditional disk technology with better cost to performance ratio as well.

The cloud, on the other hand, is gradually becoming a preferred place for parking information for many organizations and individuals. What is extraordinary about cloud computing is that it is capable of offering access to information storage and management as a service off the Internet, without the expertise or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. This is revolutionizing computing and information storage, particularly at the personal and SME levels.

Amidst all this, the realities of the global economic downturn have been hard to ignore but times of challenge are also times of opportunity.

A recent analyst report observed that even in these times of constricted IT spending, information storage, back-up and recovery were perceived as priority spends. This is simply because information today is an organization's most valuable asset. It has never been more important to optimize IT investments and use information management as an enabler for efficiency and business success.

Sarv Sarvanan is the VP and MD, EMC India Center of Excellence.