By Mike Palman, Managing Director, Green Plane Solutions

As technology moves on, it’s worth reflecting on just how much of an impact IT has had on what we do on a daily basis.

Storing information has its own challenges and let’s remember that documents come in all shapes and sizes.  Technically documents can also be audio and video and all documents will need to be stored and accessed seamlessly, often by many users.

The headache of storage has been both created and solved in a variety of different ways.  Not so long ago there was microfiche – a small piece of photographic film printed with miniscule data – but these soon disappeared, as they were difficult to find and had to be refiled in the correct place after viewing.

Magnetic tapes were also used to store documents as they had huge capacity and were considered to be very low cost.  However, as storage costs reduced, it was found to be easier to store documents on disks and as the disk arrays got bigger and bigger, different problems emerged and the desire to store even more data increased.

Today we still have such a huge appetite for information, it’s very unclear as to where everything‘s going.  One interesting fact is that in the US alone there are four trillion documents being stored and that document growth will be 22% compound year on year – wow!

Tape systems seem to have made a resurgence and are again seen as a very cost effective way of storing information and documents.  It seems to me that we will continue to look for media where we can store our documents securely and cost effectively as clearly we have learned lessons from the past 10 years or so.  Moore’s law, dating from 1965, relating to speed, capacity, memory and processing capacity doubling every two years seems to be working very well.

So in years to come, we will be storing more, we will be storing it cheaper and will be able to access it quicker – who said innovation was dead?