IBM today announced it has completed the acquisition of StoredIQ, a privately held company based in Austin, Texas.

The acquisition is meant to advance IBM's efforts to derive value from big data, respond more efficiently to litigation and regulations, and dispose of information in an automated way that has outlived its purpose.

IBM estimates that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day -- so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. As a result, chief information officers (CIOs) and general counsels (GCs) are overwhelmed by volumes of information that exceed their tax IT budgets and their capacity to meet legal requirements. Storing old, unnecessary data adds storage and infrastructure costs and compromises companies' ability to effectively comply with legal obligations.

StoredIQ is designed to offer effective governance of the vast majority of information, including its timely disposal to eliminate unnecessary data that consumes infrastructure and elevates risk. The addition of StoredIQ builds on IBM's prior acquisitions of PSS Systems and Vivisimo as well as organic solutions that improve information economics including value-based archiving, records and retention management, ediscovery management, and disposal and data governance.

StoredIQ software targets disparate and distributed email, file shares, desktops and collaboration sites. It can analyze high volumes of unstructured data and can be configured to automatically collect it for ediscovery purposes as well as dispose of files and emails in compliance with regulatory requirements. As a result, legal teams can mitigate risks by meeting compliance obligations more effectively, and IT can dispose of unnecessary data and align information cost to value to take out excess costs.

"Most CIOs and GCs know they're saving too much data, which drives up IT costs and increases legal risk," said Deidre Paknad, Vice President of Industry Solutions, who is leading the integration of StoredIQ at IBM. "With IBM and StoredIQ, organizations can maximize the value of big data and more effectively meet growing legal and privacy duties while disposing of data debris to control both cost and risk."