Helping Federal IT Decision Makers Evaluate the Enterprise Information Archiving Marketplace

Last week Gartner, a leading information technology and research advisory company, released its 2013 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports have long been considered the benchmark for assessing how technology providers are “executing against their stated vision.” While gaining a measure of how your technology provider stacks up against the competition is important in any field, it’s particularly relevant in a field such as information archiving, which is not only in a period of rapid evolution, but also one that if the technology is not performing to expectation could have far reaching ramifications if information is inadequately protected while at rest, particularly when it comes to e-discovery and forensics.

So, what should a federal agency CIO who is looking to invest in an information archiving solution expect from the information archiving solutions marketplace? Since the Magic Quadrant works by ranking solutions both on the completeness of vision and the ability to execute on that vision, decision makers should look primarily at companies that are in the top right quadrant. But once they’re inside that top right quadrant, what exactly should they be looking for?

Based on Gartner’s assessment of leading information archiving solutions these factors are most important:

Look for a system that can provide a single platform and support a wide variety of content from multiple sources.
What advanced functionalities does the product offer? More robust solutions include features such as indexing search as part of their native functionality and support e-discovery.
What’s the word on the street about product availability and support? Is the company well connected through a partner network to provide both service and support when you need it?
Can the solution provider outline a clear, cohesive product roadmap?
How does the product scale? What might work for small and medium businesses might not be best suited to the large-scale demands of a federal government agency.

With this evaluation criteria in mind, why not head over to the Resource Center to check out the full 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving.