Managing content in the enterprise database

Hi, my name's Brian Babineau and I'm an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. Today I'd like to talk to you about managing content in the Enterprise database. Today, organizations are creating more content than ever, and in the face of regulatory compliance, it becomes very challenging to manage that information. 80% of the information that we create is unstructured. That is, it doesn't reside in a database. Examples are documents, images, audio/visual files and there are several others.

Where is all this content kept today? Well, IT has deployed a number of file servers to store all this information. Unfortunately, it's very hard to secure, it's very hard for application users to access the content, and it's not searchable. One of the ways we can solve this issue is by bringing all of the information stored across the file systems and other computers into the database.

What do you gain when you centralize all of your content within the database? I like to think of them in three C's. The first is Centralize. By bringing all the information together, end users - application users - can actually search all the information to find what they're looking for.

The second C: Control. How do you provide this access so that people can share the information that they've created?

And lastly, Compliance. You want to make sure that you're in compliance with all of the security and privacy regulations that exist within the marketplace today.

In summary, as organizations want to improve their control over information, ESG suggests that you evaluate bringing all your unstructured content and structured content into a database. When you're looking to find the benefits, remember the three C's: Centralize, Control, and Compliance. As information becomes an important part of your business, you're going to want to have that control, and be able to manage content in a more effective fashion.