Research Report: Digital Archive Market Forecast 2010-2015
ESG Research Report

Jul 06, 2010
ESG has updated its digital archive market forecast—defined as ESG’s estimate of the total, worldwide cumulative capacity of archived electronic information (digital archive capacity) in the commercial and government sectors— through the year 2015.
In general, ESG defines digital archiving as:
“The long-term retention and management of electronic information that has been purposefully retained to satisfy records management, data management, regulatory compliance, or litigation support requirements. Archived information differs from backup data in that backup data is typically a temporary copy of a data set that is ultimately overwritten, while archived information is moved—not copied—from one system to another and is often a permanent copy of a record or data set that is stored without alteration or deletion for a specified period of time.”
In other words, this forecast counts those historical digital assets that have been moved and/or retained to satisfy records management, data management (e.g., removing inactive or infrequently-accessed data from production systems, improving end-users’ access to information, etc.), regulatory compliance, or litigation support requirements as “digital archive capacity.”
ESG is continuing a line of ongoing digital archiving research that began in 2002. As with previous research reports on this topic (such Reference Information, Compliance, Digital Archiving End-User Survey & Market Forecast 2006-2010, and the 2007 Digital Archiving Report series), this market forecast does not identify or distinguish between competing methods of retaining and managing archived information. Rather, this forecast encompasses the activities of those organizations that have deployed e-mail archiving applications as well as those that may be using other methods to retain e-mail for business, legal, or regulatory purposes. In other words, one way to look at this forecast is as the total addressable market (from a capacity perspective) for the various digital archiving tools and methods available today. ESG does, however, build in the increasing adoption of newer, specialized digital archiving applications for e-mail, database, or file-based content.
 

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