That's the view of EMC's head of content management and archiving, Mark Lewis, who spoke exclusively at the V3.co.uk Summit. He explained that customers are already coming to his firm asking if it can federate or tie together this information and help to manage these federated repositories.

"I believe cloud computing is a big deal – its fundamentals are about making IT more efficient, separating hardware and software so you have an amorphous set of resources you can apply in the most optimum way," he said.

"But people have so many repositories that there needs to be a way to do more connections of virtual information – it's not about physically centralising the information or taking it away from its associated apps; it's about tying it together so you can find it."

Lewis explained that the healthcare industry could be one specific area that could benefit from this approach; for example multiple health records for an individual patient stored in different organisations could be tied together to create a holistic virtual picture of that patient.

"I don't think it's feasible to assume that everyone will store their data in big centralised repositories; systems will instead evolve to federate this information and new apps will evolve to leverage in place that information," said Lewis.

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