Anticipating the Growth of Compliant Records

According to a leading independent storage analyst firm, the Enterprise Storage Group, Inc, (ESG) three factors are driving the tremendous growth of official records that have be managed and archived to meet regulatory requirements:

• The exponential growth of e-mail and other electronic records that are being created each business day.
• New regulations that have broad record-keeping requirements.
• The retention periods for records that have be to retained for compliance are getting longer and longer.

ESG did extensive research on how these factors will impact the growth of records that have to be managed for compliance. ESG refers to these records as “compliant records”. Here are a few highlights of their findings:

Overall Compliance Records Growth

• The worldwide capacity of compliant records is forecasted to increase by a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64% from 2003 to 2006.
• The increase in compliant records created and stored, in conjunction with the need to manage ever-increasing volumes of data will hasten the shift to online, digitized records management.

Life Sciences Records Growth

• The Life Sciences industry is projected to have the fastest growing capacity of compliant records over the next three years.
• The worldwide capacity of Life Sciences compliant records is forecasted to grow at CAGR of 86% from 2003 to 2006.

HealthCare Records Growth

• The Healthcare industry has the largest capacity of compliant records.
• The worldwide capacity for Healthcare compliant records is projected to grow at a CAGR of 52%.
• Paper, film and microfiche are still the most common media type for this industry, but they are projected to shrink from representing 61% of the total media in 2003 to 39% in 2006.

Financial Services Records Growth

• The capacity of compliant records in the Financial Services industry will grow at a CAGR of 74% from 2003 to 2006.
• Tape is the most common media type in this industry, but is forecasted to decline from 74% of the total in 2003 to 48% in 2006.

If you work in any of these industries, you should be planning:

• For significant growth in the volume of records you have to manage for compliance.
• To incorporate compliance records into an overall compliant records management program.
• To seek new technology, such as digital archiving solutions, to apply records management principals to electronic records.
• To think comprehensively to avoid an application-specific approach that would be hard to keep consistent with other systems.

For more details on the research, go to: www.enterprisestoragegroup.com.