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Home » About SNIA » SNIA News » News Room » Press Release Search and Archive » View a Press Release

For release: 06 Aug 2007

SNIA Releases 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey Report

Archive practitioners confirm long-term information retention crisis

San Francisco, Calif. (August 6, 2007) "Digital information is at risk of being lost." That is the warning from 276 long-term archive practitioners who participated in the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA's) 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey Report. The recently released report by the SNIA's Data Management Forum and its 100 Year Archive Task Force captures the operating practices, requirements and issues facing organizations managing large amounts of information. This information can be managed for extended periods of time spanning from 10 years to "forever," and the study aims to provide a better understanding of market requirements so that the task force can frame a definition of best practices and technology solutions.

"Driven by compliance, security and legal risk, organizations of all types are experiencing extraordinary challenges related to the long-term retention of digital information in today's data center," said Vincent Franceschini, Chairman of the Board of the SNIA. "This ground breaking study identifies requirements from the practitioner's point of view and confirms that this pending crisis must be addressed by developing standards and best practices consistent with the operating practice we call Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

Key survey findings presented in the report include the following:

• Long-term digital information retention needs are real: 80 percent of respondents have information they must keep over 50 years, and 68 percent of respondents said they must keep this data more than 100 years.


• Long-term generally means greater than 10 to 15 years a period beyond which multiple physical media and logical format migrations must take place. Only 30 percent declared they were migrating information at regular intervals.


• Database information was considered to be most at risk of loss.


• Over 40 percent of respondents are keeping e-mail records over 10 years.


• 70 percent of respondents say they are 'highly dissatisfied' with their ability to read their retained information in 50 years.

Overall, those surveyed felt that current practices are too manual, prone to error, costly and lack adequate coordination across the organization. In addition, information classification and collaboration between those who own information and administrating groups were both recognized as very important practices that can be implemented now.

One survey respondent illustrates the challenge before us this way, "When using a digital archive understand you will have a long hard expensive road to keep the records. You have to think about the ability of your great, great, great, great ... grandchildren being able to read and logically interpret what your history was."

John Webster, Principal IT Advisor at Illuminata, Inc. commented, "We rarely if ever think of saving our digitized thoughts for the sake of posterity. But for the sake of historians, law makers, sociologists, and scientists yet to be born, we should. Otherwise, future historians may look back at this time in history as the digital dark ages."

Respondents from the RIM, Archivist, IT, Security, Legal and Business communities of 276 organizations participated by sharing their opinions, challenges and operational needs related to long-term digital information retention. The market requirements identified in the survey can be summarized into four categories. These requirements will guide the work of the SNIA's Data Management Forum moving forward:

1. Accommodate the critical business drivers behind long-term retention.


2. Overcome the barriers of cost and complexity that are inhibiting adoption of best practices.


3. Address the information practitioner's needs by providing better management tools, best-practices, job visibility and education.


4. 4. Solve the technology challenges of logical and physical migration, scalability, classification and the incorporation of metadata into archival repositories.

For more information and to view the 100 Year Archive Requirements survey, visit www.snia-dmf.org/100year.

About the SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of more than 460 member companies and close to 7,000 active individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA members share the common goal of advancing the adoption of storage networks as complete and trusted solutions. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at www.snia.org.

About the SNIA Data Management Forum

The SNIA Data Management Forum is a cooperative initiative of IT professionals, vendors, integrators, and service providers working together to conduct market education, develop best practices and promote standardization activities that help organizations become Information-Centric enterprises. Areas of focus include the technologies and services that support information lifecycle management, data protection, information security, and long-term digital information retention and preservation. For more information, visit www.snia-dmf.org.