Research note: Compliance and digital-content growth drive content-storage market
Published May 20, 2003
By Jamie Gruener, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Computing & Networking,
The Yankee Group
Over the last several years, the percentage of data considered to be digital content has accelerated, prompting a drive toward handling this data differently by considering its performance, production, access and delivery. At the same time, in response to increasingly stringent federal guidelines and regulations regarding data retention, enterprises have had to develop compliance strategies to properly save documents, files, and correspondence. The result is an emerging storage market segment, which the Yankee Group calls content storage.
Digital content has grown continually over the past five years, accounting for 18 percent of enterprises' total storage capacity in 2002 and growing to 39 percent in 2006. Over the last 18 months, storage-system vendors have begun offering storage systems that tackle different problems within this environment. It is important to note that the addressable market for content storage will remain much larger than the actual storage systems dedicated to this market, given that enterprises store much of their digital content in traditional, general-purpose storage systems, either network-attached storage (NAS) or storage arrays.
So what's different about a content-storage system? Specifically, content-storage systems provide a number of features not usually associated with traditional storage systems, including specialized software to index, archive, or serve up files based on specific requirements.
There are two evolving subcategories:
More detailed analysis on the content storage market can be found in the Yankee Group Enterprise Computing & Networking report, "Next-generation storage systems target application requirements and efficiency."
Compliance-focused content-storage systems help enterprises
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preserve content to comply with regulatory rules, including files that must remain unchanged over time to protect data integrity. Examples include:
This segment, which today represents the lion's share of content-storage system revenue, is accelerating rapidly due to the tremendous pressure on enterprises to establish data-retention policies. In most cases, these systems typically store fixed, read-only data with unique identification mechanisms to determine age and owner.
Exhibit 1
Content-storage systems market
[TABLE]
Source: The Yankee Group, 2003
Market analysis and predictions
Content storage is part of a much larger enterprise-driven need to comply with regulations that mandate data preservation. The evolving compliance market is growing rapidly into a multibillion-dollar opportunity, given the need for systems, storage-management software, and professional services targeting enterprises' needs to develop and enforce data-retention strategies.
Financial services, healthcare, biotech, and government agencies are likely early adopters of digital content technology because of industry-specific regulations. All public corporations also will be under pressure to preserve more financial data required for financial statement accounting, thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
One cannot ignore the second driver of content storage systems: digital content itself. This includes data such as large video, audio, and other files available over a high-speed connection. This part of the market segment focuses much more heavily on performance, since the data here is not "fixed," it is data in production or delivery that must be made available and accessible very quickly.
Most of the content-storage systems we are focusing on have special features to improve management, scalability, and the speed at which users can access these files, both for delivery and for manipulation by one or more users at the same time.
Market leaders
Market challengers
Vendor recommendations
Enterprise recommendations
The above research note was reprinted by permission from The Yankee Group. Copyright 1997-2002, The Yankee Group. (To inquire about other Yankee Group research on the storage market, contact The Yankee Group directly.)
About the author: Beyond his role at The Yankee Group, Jamie Gruener also answers reader questions and writes a monthly column on storage-related issues for SearchStorage.com. You can also sign up to hear some advice from Jamie in a webcast, available after June 30, 2003, on the topic of handling the new data regulations. Pregister or view the webcast.
