The mystery of the missing bits in Europe
A couple of years ago i became sensitive to the fact that European companies seem to have dramatically less storage on their networks - in general, and per employee or per revenue dollar - than North American companies. Where are the missing bits? How can a multi-national, headquartered in Europe, run its business with a small fraction of the information its North American competitors need to run their business? If anyone has an answer, I would love to hear it. The difference (from my unscientific survey) is enormous – generally a factor of 10. If a North American bank has a petabyte, its European equal has only 100 terabytes, often less. Surely 90% of the bits in North America are not junk… So far the only material difference I can find in business practices is that while companies on both sides of the pond are treating compliance (other than PCI) quite lightly, many of the European companies I speak with are doing almost nothing. Since a lot of the compliance legislation ultimately translates to ‘you can’t delete anything’, this may account for some of the difference, but certainly not all of it. Stay tuned, the investigation continues…
Thursday, November 15, 2007 8:15:19 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Observations