The world is facing a growing issue, a deluge of information. According to global research firm IDC, worldwide information is more than doubling every two years, with 1.8 zettabytes or 1.8 trillion gigabytes projected to be created and replicated this year alone. The growth of the digital universe continues to outpace the growth of storage capacity. All of us are adding to this complexity by accessing information via networks, smart phones, multiple devices etc.

This unprecedented "information explosion", is not just restricted to organizations, but goes beyond the corporate sector. E-governance is all around us, with multiple projects and initiatives being planned and underway. This creates innumerable challenges since buying more storage involves significant costs.

This sector is on the brink of experiencing a massive boom. All such initiatives include gathering of citizens personal and sensitive information, that need to be stored properly, protected and retrieval across networks when needed and for disaster recovery as well.

The process of digitization involves using the vast IT capital the country has created to benefit a larger population. This goes across land records, defense records, tax records or health records, information housed within government institutions is growing manifold.

The sheer rate of growth of all this information is unprecedented. The year 2017 marks the transition of government paper files to e-files which is a clear indication that information management is going to become top priority for government officials. The officials are busy scanning thousands of paper files across as many as 12 Central government departments to make them available online.

Also, most of the data is in the unstructured format. The problem with managing unstructured data is that data is typically very scattered and is not assigned ownership. In addition to that, problems exist with identification of old or irrelevant data, allocation of storage to the appropriate business unit or department, and understand data usage and consumption trends. There is an urgent need for implementation of the right technology to handle critical, semi and unstructured information.

In such a scenario, information management technologies like deduplication and archiving can be effective tool for empowering the government in dealing with the data monster that is a potential threat to their overall profitability and the functioning.

Role of Deduplication and Archiving in intelligent information Management
Over the next four years, the world will produce a combination of structured and unstructured data. Information will grow over 400% predicts IDC. Even as information grows exponentially, its importance is reaching newer heights for both enterprises as well as the government.

Information needs to be made more intelligent without imposing a large burden on the user to have to do a lot of work manually. In such a scenario, one technology which can prove to be of huge help is Deduplication. Data deduplication simply means elimination of redundant data and is one of the most effective techniques that organizations can adopt to combat the rapid growth in information.
By consolidating existing storage resources, deduplication enables organization to reduce their backup storage costs to a great extent.

When we speak of archiving, it means the automated capturing and indexing of information from messaging, file servers and collaborative systems into a compressed, searchable data file for possible use at a later time. This is required not only to experience a reduction in storage costs but also due to legal compliance. Archiving data reduces the need to backup multiple copies and dramatically reduces the total footprint of the secondary data.

The Way Forward
The government is looking at a focused way on the growth roadmap, therefore has taken aggressive steps towards streamlining government process and digitizing relevant information. The digitizing of government databases due to acts like the Right to Information, roll out of numerous e-governance projects and initiatives like these are expected to create huge amounts of data in the government sector.

Hence, this sector will witness significant data growth in the near future.  In order to deal with this data deluge, the government sector is now open to adopting newer technologies. In fact according to Zinnov Research the Government sector in India will be one of the top sectors in terms of IT maturity; vertical wise IT spend and potential for cloud adoption.

Such solutions can help the government intelligently manage its information and leverage the same in the most efficient manner.

Vijay Mhaskar is VP, Information Management Group, Symantec.