The feature, which Tarzey says is based on a Quocirca report published late last year on the subject, notes that the world of IT storage can sound a little dull.

But, he says, when you consider the innovations that have occurred in storage over the last decade, readers should not fail to be impressed.
It is interesting, he notes, that in 2007 the Nobel committee saw fit to award its Physics Prize to Peter Gruenberg and Albert Fert for their discovery of giant magneto resistance (GMR) in the late 1980s.

GMR, says Tarzey, is perhaps the most important phenomenon behind the storage revolution. Commercial use of GMR has led to huge increases in the density of information that can be stored and to the miniaturisation of storage devices, which in itself has underpinned the boom in consumer products such as iPods and HDD recorders.

It has also, he adds, led to a huge decrease in the cost of storage for businesses and an equally big increase in storage capacity at all levels.

For businesses, he says, the biggest headache around storage has become not a lack of space but a surfeit of it, making it difficult to know what is stored and where and to ensure the security of their data.

Finding material on mass storage, says Tarzey, is aided by increasingly powerful enterprise search tools.

Stored content is indexed and later searched for and retrieved based on various search criteria.

Search tools, he says, are powerful, but do not address the whole problem. There are so many places that content can end up, often beyond the reach of such tools.

Without controls around content creation and use, says the Quocirca service director, sensitive information can end up almost anywhere and unwanted content can appear seemingly from nowhere; search does not prevent unwanted content getting stored in the first place.

It's against this backdrop that Tarzey states there is no silver bullet for ensuring content security.

It needs, he says, to be addressed in three main areas: end point security, the internal use of data, and at the network edge.