IT chiefs have been urged to go on a storage diet. Analyst firm Gartner recommends that enterprises are better served by the introduction of so-called information-access technologies, rather than the current penchant to splurge on cheap storage.

The fear of litigation combined with falling storage costs has encouraged many chief information officers to store masses of data, resulting in unnecessary business expense, argued Whit Andrew, analyst, Gartner in a new report.

The introduction of information-access technology, such as enterprise search, content classification and categorisation, and clustering would be far more efficacious, he said.

“With information access technology, companies that previously made retention decisions based on intuitive judgements about what was important can now designate critically on more advance approaches for measuring the value of content,” said Andrews.

Information-access technology will pay for itself when organisations do not have to upgrade their storage requirements so quickly, he added.

Vendors are also offering data storage services to help companies sort out what data they need to store, said Steve Murphy, managing director Hitatchi Data systems, a firm that offers such a service.

Hitatchi has begun offering customers two years of free storage upgrades, including the use of technologies such as virtualisation and de-duplication, to ensure companies make better use of their storage infrastructure, Murphy added.