The Impact Of Convergence On Content Management, Archiving, And Retention Policies

Enterprises need consistent content management approaches to contend with the explosive volume and diversity of content. The rapid rise of email, documents, rich media, images, and other unstructured content types entails significant total cost of ownership burdens and makes accessing information difficult for both employees and business processes. This content surge has coincided with increasingly complex compliance and eDiscovery requirements that complicate content-related risk mitigation. Historically, organizations attempted to address these issues by focusing on a single application or content type — such as email archiving — leaving today's organizations with highly fragmented environments. The challenges posed by this situation directly affect enterprise balance sheets, capture executive attention, and provide information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals with an opportunity to lead with new approaches to retention management.