- Critical business issues highlighted include lost documentation, version control and compliance concerns –

Over 60% of UK businesses would be unable to find a saved document sent by email in the last year, according to a major trends survey conducted at this week’s Storage Expo by ONStor, a leading provider of clustered NAS solutions for primary and value-tier storage for enterprises and content-rich organisations.

The survey was a study into the ability of UK business to cope with the rapid increase in information sources and was conducted among the 2387 business decision makers, who attended the Show on its first day.

Results show that UK organisations are facing Content Chaos as they lose control of information and potentially fail to comply with increasing amounts of mandatory legislation.

Key points highlighted include:
A massive 94% felt that it was easier to find digital documents than paper ones.  Surprisingly in this digital age 6% still felt that plowing through paper was the easiest way.
60% stated that they have lost a document sent by email
However 63% state that they would be able to find an email sent over 12 months ago
An amazing 41% of those questioned admitted to the fact that they still saved data and documents on their desktop even though they knew it needed to be saved on a corporate system
Not surprisingly given this 75% of those questioned owned up to having major issues with version control!
Critically compliance was highlighted as a major business issue with 88% of the sample stating that their businesses would be able to supply email if it was needed for an audit
However when it came to instant messaging 60% of the sample felt that this would fail an audit whilst 68% stated that no controls were in place for SMS messaging

Marcos Burnett, Country Manager for ONStor in the UK, stated: “There was overwhelming evidence from this survey that UK corporates are struggling with the dramatic growth in business data and the flood of content now engulfing us all. Not knowing where documentation is and the loss of that information is perceived as one of the greatest challenges confronting many in business today.”

“One key finding was that 70% of our test sample did use email to agree to contracts and as such recognised that the outcome was legally binding.  In other words the digital content revolution is upon us albeit with some critical business issues unresolved!” he concluded.