Almost two-thirds of the IT executives who participated in Nemertes’ benchmark, “Information Stewardship: Holistic Data Management in the Enterprise,” say archiving—and the related logging and auditing capabilities—are “vital,” and 24% consider them “very important.” And yet, only 21% of participants are using technology to help with their retrieval efforts, despite the fact that this is an onerous process for most.

Although the majority of IT executives consider their organizations to be “very” or “extremely” successful at information retrieval, six percent say they’re completely unsuccessful at it. This is a problem not just for compliance, but also for legal discovery, during which companies may be required to produce electronic records in a timely fashion. Companies that can’t face steep fines, among other headaches.

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IT executives interested in driving information stewardship within their organizations can use compliance as a motivator.

Among companies that are subject to at least one regulation, the value placed on compliance goes up.

Fully 86% of those IT executives tell us that compliance is a “vital” issue for them and their organizations. That compels them to pay attention to the broader issue: 63% of companies that are governed by at least one regulation are also aware of information stewardship, compared with 33% of companies that are not regulated.

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When asked to list their top information stewardship challenge, 15% of IT executives participating in a recent Nemertes benchmark claimed data prioritization and classification, and another 12% mentioned the sheer volume of information in the enterprise. But IT executives place different values on different aspects of information-lifecycle management and disaster recovery.

For instance, 55% of participants say that back-up and recovery is “vital” to their businesses, and another 34% consider it “very important.” Yet back-up and recovery is not as strong a cost-justifier for purchasing information-stewardship technology as some other business issues.

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