Data storage requirements and the associated costs are not a new pain point for IT organisations. What are new pain points are governance, risk and compliance imperatives. Data needs to be retrieved within a reasonable time frame to meet legal discovery requirements. In terms of South Africa`s new Protection of Personal Information Bill, companies not protecting personal data to the degree the Bill requires will feel a lot of pain too. And then there are green initiatives, or more pragmatically put, the urgent need to reduce power consumption countrywide.

What all this means is that IT and business need to get their pretty little heads around what data the company has, where it is, what needs to be kept for legal, governance, compliance or regulatory purposes, what must be retained for operational purposes, and how to do all this without having a nervous breakdown.