Burning a CD or DVD or using USB stick may well work in a small department, but in a goverment org and I'd suggest is the same for a commercial organisation you need enterprise software, anything else is suicide. We run Enterprise Vault for e-mail and Commvault for backups, we are about to use Commvaults file archiving and deduplication, I wish we'd used the Commvault e-mail archive also. We force 'My Documents' to the users home drive, enourage 'make available offline' for encrypted laptops and also restrict USB access. USB sticks should be considerd as a temporary medium. If data is leaving on any media we need to have an audit trail. We are also looking at restricting the creation of PST files. I'd like to enforce quotas but can't get management buy in yet, we have a security team that regularily scans for material that breaches policy, which keeps the photo albums off my storage. I guess you pitch your strategy to your scale, I have 12tb on 6 fileservers, not to mention the application servers. I agree with Discovery, getting hit by a Freedom of Information request or other legal search means you need control.
I am not sure what angle the author is taking with suggesting CD or DVD as an alternative to IT-centered solutions, leaving users decide what sits on a server and what they back up. Also data on users desktop mean support would have to pussyfoot around users, copying data back and forth if forced to re-image a desktop. I would not like to expose my career by being dependant on a DVD or CD. More suitable for home use, I suggest.