Many things drive storage growth, including continued digitization of business processes and documents; increasing size of files, as organizations move to digital media (for example voice mail attached to e-mail); and retention of more data and for longer periods.
The contact center, as the focus of huge numbers of conversations, is also a focus of these growth factors. Audio files recording conversations can be very large, and a contact center may generate hundreds to tens of thousands of conversations every day. What happens in the contact center casts a long shadow over retention and storage not just because of short term needs (storage required to handle traffic going on right now, or today) but because of long-term retention.
Contact center traffic intimately concerns ongoing business activities — especially complaints, which have an ability to spin into lawsuits. With the potential for lawsuits a major driver and shaper of retention policies (where folks have them) or the simpler decision to retain everything as long as possible (in lieu of a more selective policy), UC in the contact centers means holding onto more data, longer. It is no surprise, then, that those implementing UC in their contact centers are expecting much higher storage growth over the next 12 and 24 months than those not doing so.
