IDC performs a study annually on what it refers to as the Digital Universe. Their 2010 study described the dramatic growth of digital information to 800,000 petabytes (62% growth from 2009), and projected future growth to 35 zetabytes by 2020. The graphic below visually demonstrates this:

Pretty amazing. If you're involved with keeping up with storage requirements for your organization, this probably doesn't come as a surprise. The IDC study also identifies some of the coming challenges in finding information, securing it, and meeting compliance requirements. IDC estimates that today, some 30% of information requires a level of IT-based security beyond basic virus protection and physical protection. According to IDC, by 2020 fully 50% of information will require this higher level of security. Information is growing rapidly, and the % of digital information requiring higher security is also growing significantly.

What does this have to do with SharePoint, and security? Clearly, as a platform that gets used as a content repository and collaboration platform, SharePoint sites will be a popular place to store digital content. From a security standpoint, the coming deluge of digital content presents some real challenges. Getting a handle on sensitive and regulated content being stored in SharePoint is important. So too is establishing governance over what sorts of information can be stored in the platform. From a security and compliance standpoint, it's also important to architect your SharePoint infrastructure to meet your security requirements and compliance obligations. For most sensitive information types (HR, health data, PII, customer information, IP), and for many compliance regulations, this will mean using encryption to protect the information. All encryption solutions are not created equal, however. For a web-based application architecture such as SharePoint, the encryption insertion point matters. Solutions that encrypt at a low level (such as EFS, Bitlocker, and SQL TDE) provide threat protection against disk and media theft, but that's it. CipherPoint's transparent encryption for SharePoint, on the other hand, inserts at the web front end, thereby providing threat protection against a broader range of threats, including against insiders taking a peek (or stealing) sensitive data.

The IDC Digital Universe study from 201 is available here.

JD