Running surveys is an age-old approach that technology vendors take in order to make some news. It’s also a really good source of data points for technology commentators – so long as you ignore the requisite vendor pitch amongst the data, these surveys are pretty useful tools. The latest to come across my desk is one from productivity solutions vendor Docurated. Essentially Docurated is a vendor that helps organizations surface the most valuable and relevant content in its various content stores.
Anyway – on to the survey itself. The State of Document Management Reports was undertaken in order to examine the key trends and challenges around document management, a space which is both highly boring and someone forgotten in the headfirst race to adopt (or at least talk about) enterprise file sharing solutions. But while document management is undeniably boring, it’s also important, with an ever-increasing number of documents within organizations’ content stores, good technology that helps surface the right stuff is a no-brainer.
So, without any further ado, here where the key findings in the Docurated survey:
- Document management is a key pain point and priority, nearly two thirds of IT Executives are investing in Document Management initiatives
- 68% of organizations have 5 or more storage repositories
- Despite the hype around Cloud, 77% of respondents still use file servers as their primary repository
- The inability to find content and poor mobility are cited as the biggest challenges IT Leaders face
- Cloud Storage is being deployed but more than 79% of documents are still stored on-premises
- Despite efforts to consolidate the number of storage repositories, companies are actually increasing the number of silos they manage
All of these findings are interesting in their own right, but much more so when one considers how much attention enterprise file sharing vendors like Box, Dropbox, Egnyte and ShareFile have garnered in recent years. It’s counter-intuitive, given all the attention these vendors have gained, that CIOs would still be looking at document management across multiple repositories as a primary concern. After all, the cloud was meant to mark the end of multiple silos, it was meant to mean the seamless sharing of files and the end to disconnected file stores. The existence of an ever increasing number of silos, and escalating repository types suggests a new approach is needed.
Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect success of the approach advocated by the file sharing vendors: that of resolving to a single repository on top of which collaboration occurs. Perhaps the best solution is indeed a document management fabric that sits on top of distributed file storage and that lets silos exist which abstracting discovery and access onto a higher level service. That’s the approach that vendors like Panzura and Nasuni advocate and, while I have been critical of their approach in the past, perhaps its the most pragmatic solution to an apparently intractable problem.
It’s a topic I spoke at length about with Nasuni’s CEO, Andres Rodriguez, recently. His perspective was that dividing storage from the sharing and collaboration aspects makes sence. By separating data from control a whole host of problems are solved. File locking for large files becomes easier, backups and disaster recovery become a function of software and not constricted by hardware and all those existing assets that organizations have can be leveraged to the nth degree.
It’s a perspective that very much rails against the orthodox view on enterprise content management and file sharing, but it might just be a perspective that delivers the most efficient and effective solution for customers, regardless of whether the file sharing heavy weights like it or not.
