12th December 2007
High percentage of duplicated files found
Active Navigation, a leading information management solutions company, today announces results from a recent pilot Content Audit it ran for a large UK County Council.
In its attempt to move toward an information management environment, the Shire Authority had a number of issues it needed to address before investing in an Enterprise Document Records Management (EDRM) solution. With so much legacy data on its servers it was decided to analyse a sample selection of files to estimate the size of the problem.
Using Active Navigation’s Content Audit Solution it soon discovered that up to 30 percent of its ICT files had exact or near document matches and if cleaned up, it could mean freeing up more than a third of storage. In another area, just under thirty thousand files were audited and the results were even more compelling, with nearly half of its files found to be exact or near matches, representing a potential storage saving of about 20 percent. The amount of storage saving is dependent on the size of the files.
Such high levels of duplication would hinder the council’s efforts to migrate their documents to any new document management system. Additionally by removing duplicated files, a large amount of storage could be freed up which would result in reduced backup times. A recent study by Berkeley University estimates that the true cost of information storage per terabyte of data is more than $145K per year to store and maintain. Of this less than 10 percent is attributable to the hardware costs.
“Deploying Active Navigation has been a salutary experience for us to discover such high levels of duplication” says a spokesman. “We are in the throes of implementing a new EDRM and Sharepoint, so it makes sense for us to conduct a Content Audit to ensure that we don’t return to previous levels of duplication chaos.”
Peter Baumann , Chief Executive at Active Navigation says, “Using a content audit is an important step for companies to identify the size of a task associated with migrating content to a new document management system. In a very short time it enables inappropriate, redundant and duplicate data to be identified. Organisations can also meet their compliance requirements and see a significant reduction in costs associated with IT management infrastructure.”
During the pilot an effective file plan was created for each area, representing the content as well as the organizational requirements, in a fraction of the time it would have taken using traditional methods. The solution has provided the cleansed and structured content with an interim search and navigation functionality for its users. And when the county council is ready, this cleansed data can be easily migrated to populate the EDRM system.