Do manufacturers retain too little data, or too much?

While less affected than financial services and healthcare, manufacturers too are experiencing unprecedented information-storage pressures. "Although much depends on the nature of the business—and how data-intensive it is—it's unrealistic for manufacturers to think they can buck the trend," warns Anne MacFarland, director of infrastructure architectures and solutions at Wellesley, Mass.-based The Clipper Group. "Until recently, there was a sense that e-mail archiving sufficed, but now—due to liability and compliance issues—there's a need to retain production and design data as well."

The problem is compounded by the granularity of the storage requirement, and the need to distinguish between multiple versions of subtly different unstructured data—e.g., the changes made to a drawing or spreadsheet over time, while the document itself retains the same name. "FedEx has shown just how granular information can get," says MacFarland, referring to the carrier's ability to call up a wealth of data on each consignment in its care.

According to survey data from information-storage vendor Bridgehead Software, just 18 percent of manufacturers presently undertake automated archiving of "day-to-day" transactional data. "Many manufacturers don't retain information such as on which individual machine products were made, when, and by whom," says MacFarland.

However, says Bridgehead Senior VP Patrick Dowling, "Although storage costs are falling, the appetite for storage is growing sharply. Overall cost, for many companies, is increasing."

Yet an opportunity may be missed. Dowling says survey data cited suggests 60 percent of CIOs estimate they could remove 30 percent or more of the data they presently retain in primary storage—if they only knew which data that was.

Investing in secondary storage archival tools can be cash-neutral or even cash-positive. Although individual circumstances differ, stresses Dowling, "many organizations could, with the proper file-archiving tools, reduce the amount of data on primary storage to the extent that no new primary capacity would be needed for at least a year."