Stephen Chan, VP of Business Development and Co-Founder of ZL Technologies (www.zlti.com), says:

In a recent study, Gartner found that enterprise data is expected to grow over 650% over the next five years. As the proliferation of big data continues to surge at a staggering rate, the challenges associated with management is expected to increase directly. Traditional methods will prove futile or too costly. The market is shifting and organizations are learning that the best approach to tackle the exponential influx of data is with a unified solution that utilizes single silo storage.

Here are some other trends to watch out for in the coming year:

Unstructured data is expanding. As we live in an increasingly digitalized world, more and more types of unstructured data are being introduced each day. In addition to emails and files, social media like Twitter, Facebook, SMS, BlackBerry messages, and other data types are rapidly entering the mix. But even as the types of data increase, maintaining all types in a unified silo become more and more important.

Email: The tail that wags the dog. While 80% of corporate data stored is unstructured, 80% of this unstructured data is comprised solely of email. It is the single largest data type within the organization. As a result, email archiving will become even more critical, ensuring that non-record emails are retained until properly classified or declared as a record. Unified control of emails at every stage is crucial to litigation, governance, records management, and business intelligence efforts because it provides the single source of truth for the business.

Stop keeping it forever. With the increase in data generated, there will also be increased attention on data disposition and lifecycle management. Proper classification and disposition policies must be established so that data is not stored forever. Unified control of lifecycle policies is the only way to ensure their effectiveness.