As data volumes have grown exponentially in the past few years, storage hardware vendors have introduced significantly improved media to cater for these volumes. The challenge, driven internally through organisational requirements and externally by compliance legislation, is to ensure stored data assets can be both managed and accessed.
Companies such as EMC, StorageTek and Network Appliance have introduced content addressed storage (CAS), a software-driven architecture designed to address the storage requirements of fixed content such as documents, reports, images, audio, video and the Web. Other technologies such as write-once-read-many (WORM) storage protect data from being modified or deleted.
Migrating archives from low service level storage (paper, film, fiche, tape, optical) and storing data on newer storage media gives organisations the benefits of enhanced information lifecycle management (ILM).
Joe Rios, content management consultant at Bateleur Software, says that while most organisations have the capacity to store all their user data, they remain highly concerned about the access, retrieval and management of these data assets.
"Organisations need integrated, easy access to enterprise content in any format from any of these sources. We address this need by providing customers with native integration to such storage, enabling the exploitation of these newer, more cost-effective storage systems without requiring other hardware connectivity components," Rios says.
"Enterprise content management systems that integrate natively with CAS storage benefit organisations by unlocking fixed content that used to reside on tape or optical storage."
Bateleur Software is the official South African representative of Mobius Management Systems, the predominant provider of total content management (TCM) solutions. The ViewDirect TCM solution, for example, manages all the content that supports both internal and outward-facing applications. It is built on a content repository that supports all enterprise content - in any format, from any source - and makes it available for real-time Web delivery and to support business processes.
"Our customers store and access huge volumes of unchanging content including bills, statements, cheque images, report output, scanned forms, e-mail, transactions, policies and customer correspondence," Rios explains. "Leveraging these newer storage technologies helps customers comply with the most demanding regulatory requirements for electronic storage, while still easily managing this diverse content.
"Productivity is improved by providing ready access to both structured data in databases as well as unstructured data in user documents. We enable our customers to manage high-volume content repositories throughout their lifecycle, in open system and mainframe environments."
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