IT departments are struggling to consolidate growing data storage requirements, and the digital information burden is only going to worsen in the next few years, according to research.

Global data volume is growing by almost 60 per cent per year, says the Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe survey, conducted by analyst IDC on behalf of supplier EMC.

And although 70 per cent of the estimated 281 billion gigabytes of digital data stored is created by individuals, the responsibility for protecting and maintaining 85 per cent of it lies with businesses.

“The burden is on IT departments within organisations to address the risks and compliance rules around information misuse, data leakage and safeguarding against breaches,” said EMC chief executive Joe Tucci.

Forthcoming rules on storing additional information are unlikely to afford IT departments the opportunity to solve the problem, said IDC analyst Martin Hingley.

“Anybody who trades in the US can be called to court to produce every email that contains the word Switzerland in the past five years, and in the future that might be expanded to every instant message that contains the word Switzerland, or every image of Switzerland,” he said.

“There is a load of techniques that can be applied to reduce the volume of data that has to be saved, such as de-duplication, unstructured data search, and database analytics.

“But most of them require either very smart automated software to deal with unstructured data or policy changes on how we run our systems.”