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.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Digital Archive Market Forecast 2010-2015 Executive Summary

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• How pervasive is the usage of VTL technology in backup environments? Does this vary based on the size of respondent organizations?
• Is VTL typically used more by organizations with an existing tape infrastructure as a bridge to a predominantly disk-based backup environment?
• Among organizations currently using VTL, what are their future plans regarding their VTL infrastructure?
• Why won’t current VTL users continue to invest in the technology?
• What—if any—plans do organizations using other types of disk-based backup solutions have to leverage VTL technology? What are the profiles of these potential adopters?
• Why won’t current disk-based backup users adopt VTL technology?
• Among organizations currently using tape as their backup media but planning to transition to disk-based backup solutions, what is the likelihood of using VTL?

Survey participants represent a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report The State of Virtual Tape Library Technology Executive Summary

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• How many data centers do organizations operate today? How do these numbers vary by company size and industry?
• To what extent are organizations planning to reduce/consolidate their overall number of data centers?
• How many organizations currently have new data center construction projects underway?
• Where do data center consolidation and new data center construction initiatives rank on organizations’ current list of IT priorities?
• How do data center consolidation and construction plans vary by company size class and industry?
• How do the number of existing data centers and spending mode impact data center consolidation?
• What role will outsourcing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models play in data center consolidation plans?
• What is the impact of consolidation efforts and corporate risk tolerance on new data center construction?
• What are the greatest factors influencing new data center construction?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this 24-page report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Data Center Consolidation and Construction Trends Executive Summary

In this report, ESG centered its analysis on three main areas.  First, standard baseline metrics such as the growth of e-mail, the use of quotas, and the impact of quotas on mailbox management and storage infrastructure were captured and analyzed.  Secondly, with so many changes in primary messaging environments (for example, the maturation of Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, e-mail offerings), the goal was to see how companies planned to deploy these solutions as they evaluated new messaging applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Corporate Gmail.   More specifically, ESG wanted to uncover the interest in adoption of SaaS-based message management solutions—and especially message archiving—as companies look to shift some of these tasks and the associated technology infrastructure to the cloud.  Third and finally, because the market is at a point where there are limited barriers to purpose-built e-mail archive adoption—there is plenty of competition, the technology is mature and proven, and the problems exist—ESG wanted to better understand the benefits existing e-mail archive users were realizing, how they were able to justify their investments, and what were some of the challenges they faced with their current implementations.

In covering these focus areas, this report seeks to answer the following questions:

• To what extent have midmarket and enterprise-class organizations implemented—or are planning to implement—digital archiving processes and technologies for e-mail?
• What business and technology considerations are having the greatest impact on customers’ e-mail archiving strategies?
• At what rate is the use of e-mail archiving processes and technologies growing?  What are the key factors driving that growth?
• Which types of processes and tools (e.g., purpose-built, native, manual, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, etc.) are used most widely to support e-mail archiving requirements?  How will this mix of tools change over time?
• What are the most likely timelines and decision drivers for customers making new investments in purpose-built archiving solutions for e-mail?
• How have customers successfully demonstrated ROI (return on investment) and other business justifications for purpose-built e-mail archiving solution purchases?
• What are customers’ most common e-mail archiving challenges?
• What individuals and functional groups are most involved in setting e-mail archiving strategies and polices, and funding e-mail archiving solution purchases?
• Why do some organizations continue to forego any kind of formal e-mail retention and management policies or technologies?

The conclusions discussed here are drawn from data collected via a survey of 386 qualified IT and business professionals representing such functional roles as IT infrastructure, e-mail administration, records management, and regulatory compliance.  Note that for the purposes of this survey, “e-mail archiving” was defined as follows:

The long-term retention and management of e-mail messages (and associated data such as attachments) that have been purposefully retained to satisfy records management, data management, regulatory compliance, or litigation support requirements.

To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be responsible for or familiar with their organization’s e-mail systems (i.e., e-mail application software, supporting hardware, etc.) and corporate e-mail policies and be responsible for or familiar with the processes and technologies their organization uses—or would use—to store e-mail information (including messages and attachments) for regulatory compliance, legal discovery, and general long-term retention and reference purposes.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report E-Mail Archiving Market Trends Executive Summary

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• What are the primary data protection challenges that organizations are currently facing?
• Which areas of data protection will merit the greatest level of investment in 2010?
• How confident are organizations that their data protection applications and processes are adequately protecting their data?
• Which types of data protection technologies and processes are currently in use? How will this change going forward?
• What impact does the business value of data have on data protection applications and processes?
• How satisfied are organizations with their current data protection technologies and strategies?
• What types of storage solutions are currently used to support data protection requirements and how will this change over time?
• How pervasive has data deduplication usage become over the last several years?

Survey participants represent a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report 2010 Data Protection Trends Executive Summary

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• What business imperatives are currently having the greatest impact on IT spending?
• What are organizations’ general spending plans for IT products and services in 2010 and beyond?
• How do spending plans vary by organization size, geographic region, industry, and other variables?
• What is driving the changes between 2009 spending and 2010 planned spending?
• Which IT initiatives do organizations feel are least likely to be impacted by current or future IT budget reductions? Conversely, which initiatives are most likely to be cut from IT’s wish list?
• Within specific technology segments—such as servers, storage, networking, security, and information management—which initiatives and technologies within those segments will sustain investment?
• What factors will be most important in justifying IT investments to the business over the next 12-18 months?
• What is the relationship between current and future IT spending and an organization’s overall purchasing pattern for IT products and services?
• What is the relationship between current and future IT spending and an organization’s overall tolerance for business risk?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report 2010 IT Spending Intentions Executive Summary

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• What business imperatives are currently having the greatest impact on spending for third-party IT services, including consulting and outsourcing?
• What are organizations’ general spending plans for IT professional services and outsourcing offerings in 2009 and beyond?
• To what extent are those plans impacted by the current global economic crisis?
• How do spending plans vary by organization size, geographic region, industry, and other factors?
• What is driving the changes between 2008 spending and 2009 planned spending?
• What is the relationship between an organization’s overall tolerance for business risk and current and future IT spending on professional services and outsourcing solutions?
• What is the relationship between the ability of IT organizations to meet the needs of constituents and current and future IT spending on professional services and outsourcing solutions?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and professional services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Outsourcing and PS Spending Executive Summary

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• Problem definition and scope.
  • How much of their organization’s data do security professionals consider to be confidential?
  • Do users know how many copies of confidential data they have and where they are located?
  • What are the biggest pain points?
• Market dynamics and purchasing plans.
  • What’s driving demand for confidential data security solutions and in what time frame?
  • Which areas of confidential data security will users address first?
  • In light of the global recession, how are users budgeting for confidential data security expenditures?
• Policies, processes, and procedures.
  • Which specific confidential data security policies and procedures are most important?
  • If so, how are they defined, monitored, and enforced?
  • How effective are these policies, processes, and procedures?
  • What changes need to occur?
• Technology deployment and purchasing plans.
  • Which tools are currently in use?
  • Which ones will be deployed within the next 12 months?
  • Are users deploying encryption technologies? If so, where?
  • Are encryption technology deployments tactical or strategic in nature? Are they changing?
  • How are users managing encryption keys? Is this adequate? Will it change?

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.



ESG Research Report Protecting Confidential Data Revisited Executive Summary.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• What business imperatives are currently having the greatest impact on IT spending?
• What are organizations’ general spending plans for IT products and services in 2009 and beyond?
• To what extent are those plans impacted by the current global economic crisis?
• How do spending plans vary by organization size, geographic region, industry, and other variables?
• How does planned IT spending break down per quarter for 2009?
• What is driving the changes between 2008 spending and 2009 planned spending?
• Which IT initiatives do organizations feel are least likely to be impacted by current or future IT budget reductions? Conversely, which initiatives are most likely to be cut from IT’s wish list?
• Within specific technology segments—such as servers/virtualization, storage, networking, security, and information management—which initiatives and technologies within those segments will sustain investment?
• … and much more!

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report 2009 Data Center Spending Intentions Executive Summary

Key questions this survey looked to answer were:

• What is the current adoption rate for SharePoint? How do adoption trends differ by variables such as company size, region, or industry?
• How do current and planned users rank SharePoint in relation to their organizations’ other IT initiatives?
• What business factors are driving current and planned SharePoint adoption?
• What is the current status of SharePoint implementations? Have organizations deployed SharePoint in production or test environments?
• What does the overall scope of a SharePoint environment look like today? Is SharePoint deployed across the entire organization or is it deployed across specific departments or locations? Across how many physical locations are implementations typically distributed? How many users do today’s implementations support?
• What types of users or functional groups are the most active SharePoint users?
• To what extent are organizations extending access to SharePoint resources to external constituents such as customers, contractors, and business partners?
• What do end-users view as the most important features and benefits of SharePoint?
• What challenges have current users experienced since deploying SharePoint?
• What impact is SharePoint having on IT infrastructure, specifically server and storage resources?
• … and much more!

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report SharePoint Adoption and Market Drivers Executive Summary