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That expenditure goes on 2.2 zettabytes of information, with an average of 563TB costing $332,000 for SMEs, and 100,000TB and $38 million for enterprise-scale organisations. Balancing those numbers, respondents said digital information accounts for 49% of the value of their organisations. Locally, the fraction was slightly smaller at 45%.
Information expenditure per employee doesn't vary much with the size of the organisation. Symantec reports an average of $3670 for SMEs and $3297 for enterprises.
Sean Kopelke, Symantec's director of specialist solutions for the Pacific region, told iTWire that the growth in information being stored plus its increasing complexity was outstripping the reduction in costs for storage devices and any economies of scale that might be achieved. He suggested there were two things that businesses should consider to help get their information management and storage costs under control.
The first is to accept that "not all data is created equal," and to treat information according to its value. However, that goes against the tendency to keep all data as it may be of use at a later date.
The second is to use deduplication to eliminate unnecessary copies (as much as 42% of data is duplicated), combining this practice with an appropriate archiving policy that also helps with 'just in case' data retention.
