According to IDC, the digital universe is doubling every two years, and will reach 40,000 exabytes (40 trillion gigabytes) by 2020. (Note: A single exabyte of storage can contain 50,000 years’ worth of DVD-quality video.) Organizations that fail to immediately address the long-term preservation implications of this massive tsunami of data as it enters the organization will never ever catch up.
We’ve tended to adopt an image of Digital Preservation as something frozen in time and inaccessible and hidden away in the less-traveled parts of the organization.
It is time to think about Digital Preservation differently — as a dedicated capability that keeps long-term information alive and usable and trusted and easily found. The time to act is now. AIIM believes that digital preservation needs to be viewed through the prism of a set of Intelligent Information Management capabilities that are integral to delivering upon the Digital Transformation challenge of understanding, anticipating, and redefining internal and external customer experiences.
Consider these 6 data points from a recent AIIM market research study on Digital Preservation:
75% of organizations describe digital preservation as “important” or “very important” to their organization.
But...
57% of organizations believe that existing content systems are not effective at managing long-term preservation of digital information.
53% say that long-term information is difficult to search.
47% say they have no way of knowing whether information older than ten years will actually be readable.
75% say that long-term digital records are at constant risk of not being findable, readable or useable when required.
79% say that digital information that must be kept for ten years or longer is inherently at risk due to changes in technology and file formats.