Chief information officers (CIOs) should invest in new technology that minimises the amount of data their businesses store rather than using cheaper storage costs as an excuse to store more data, a new report by analyst firm Gartner warns.

Many CIOs store more data than they have to for fear of litigation or regulatory action but this causes businesses unnecessary expense, argued Gartner analyst Whit Andrews, in a statement.

This is especially because the current explosion of information is outpacing the decline in storage prices, he added.

Instead, Andrews advised organisations to adopt "information access technology", such as enterprise search, content classification and categorisation and clustering.

"With information access technology, companies that previously made retention decisions based on intuitive judgements about what was important can now designate critically on more advanced approaches for measuring the value of content," said Andrews.

The cost of the information access technology will pay off when organisations do not have to upgrade their storage requirements so quickly.

Vendors are also offering data storage services to help companies sort out what data they need to store, said Steve Murphy, managing director of Hitatchi Data systems, a firm that offers such a service.

Hitatchi is also offering customers two years of free storage upgrades, such as virtualisation and de-duplication technologies, to ensure companies make better use of their storage infrastructure, Murphy added.