With mergers, acquisitions and growing global market pressure, life sciences firms see opportunities to cut costs, streamline business processes and manage regulatory compliance by gaining better control of unstructured information stored in legacy systems, or siloed across business units. According to one report, CIOs are dealing with at least 11 terabytes of content that is growing at a minimum of 16 percent a year. (Just to put this in perspective, the print collection of the US Library of Congress is approximately 10 terabytes of content).

"Content distributed globally within the organization creates cost redundancies and duplication of work, and limits information transparency – and information transparency and compliance will be a key focus of our new administration flexing its muscle,” said Ravi Shankar, Vice President, Life Sciences Enterprise Content Management Practice.

In the current climate of economic uncertainty and increased regulatory scrutiny, financial services and insurance firms recognize the serious legal, regulatory and financial implications of poorly managing the accountability and compliance of their electronic communications. With over 90 percent of all business communications created or stored in electronic form and data stores growing exponentially, firms are forced to become more proactive in evaluating the compliance of their retention and archival policies for electronic content.

A recent survey found that 60 percent of financial institutions have already been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee emails in litigation. Many firms confronted with this challenge have learned that volume and functional...