[michaelbuckbee]

The industry term for this is unstructured data, basically anything that isn't kept in a database.

There's more you have to consider as well, you don't want to actually just archive anything older than a year. You want to set a rule that says: "archive anything created more than a year ago that hasn't been accessed in the last 3 months".

Further, there's all sorts of documents like the ones mentioned in the article that should be continuously monitored for and quarantined "passwords.txt" or Word docs with Social Security or Credit Card numbers in them.

Then you can get really sophisticated and start doing heuristic analysis of user behavior, setting alerts when Jim in accounting's account starts accessing marketing plans or when the account activity spikes beyond 5x what their regular usage is tracked at.

Full disclosure: the company I work for - http://www.varonis.com - makes software that does all of these kind of tasks.

[boracay]

Do you see any trend where companies want their data more structured from the beginning?