The data storage and bandwidth requirements of British businesses are likely to grow exponentially over the next few years.
When implementing an electronic document management system, it can be tempting to think of your organisation’s data storage requirements in terms of what you already have. You might, for instance, create enough capacity for several years’ worth of scanned documents, perhaps allowing for a rate of growth that’s consistent with past experience, but no more than that.
This could be a problem if the digital revolution means the amount of data handled by British businesses grows exponentially, rather than at the pace it might have followed when documents were committed to paper.
Last week, UK mobile operator EE introduced a handful of new data bundles for business users, allowing them to transfer previously unheard-of volumes of digital information over its 4G mobile network. The largest of these is the world’s first one petabyte plan, offering a massive one million gigabytes of bandwidth – enough to transfer 13 years of high-definition video or 500 billion pages of standard printed text.
Even for today’s biggest public and private sector organisations, this might seem like an unnecessarily huge amount of data. However, EE said that the new bundles had been put together on the basis that it predicted business data use would grow exponentially over the next few years – reaching 860 per cent of 2013 levels by 2016.
This is because going paperless does more than just allow an organisation to capitalise on smaller administrative overheads and better use of physical space. There are a number of compelling business reasons to store more and more data as the opportunity becomes available.
One of these is big data, a relatively new idea that involves analysing huge volumes of otherwise unstructured information in real time – something that might have taken years in a paper-based office but can now be achieved in seconds, helping organisations to make important strategic decisions.
In conclusion, then, it’s important to future-proof your organisation’s data capacity. Working with a third-party provider like Dajon Data Management is one of the best ways to do this, because our cloud and enterprise solutions are truly scalable – you’ll never have to pay for more physical space and equipment than you need.