Many times archiving projects get put off for another day because of “policy paralysis,” which is an affliction that prohibits IT decision makers from deciding what to keep and what to discard before implementing archiving.
Cloud-powered archiving does not penalize a simple straightforward “keep it all” plan. This means IT decision makers can implement retention archiving now, and create policies later. It’s a Win-Win scenario for IT and businesses, and is the cure to “policy paralysis.”
CMSWatch analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe highlights an important issue regarding the role cloud-computing plays ensuring long-term records management. Pelz-Sharpe says “…For what became abundantly clear from very early on was that records managers and compliance officers really need to get their head around Cloud Computing, and fast.”
Records management professionals are confused about “cloud storage” and where the data physically resides. The “cloud” may imply data is scattered around the globe and un-organized. But that is a misnomer and not true. Inside each cloud, Amazon Web Services for example, is a physical data center just like any other. With very tight security and very good up-time SLA’s.
Pelz-Sharpe says about cloud and records retention: “You need to know exactly how data is disposed of, and how that can be verified.” We couldn’t agree more. In a compliance mode data retention and data destruction are equally as important. Encryption and virtual shredding in the cloud are possible and can be a better way to shred data than using on-premise SAN/WormFS systems where too many touch-points expose risk. Records management in this era of all digital information is vital, and the cloud provides the confidence and low cost to ensure companies will not skimp on their records management initiatives.
The City of Boston’s Mayor’s office is embroiled in controversy for not preserving email records for a key adviser to the Mayor. The specific details are still being uncovered, and storage forensic experts have been retained to try to recover deleted messages from workstations and servers. If the backup tapes exist some of the data will be recovered, but at huge expense.
As we wait for the investigation to report the facts, what we do know is that the tax payer will bear the expense burden for forensic experts, and the City of Boston’s existing $1 million dollar outlay for archiving and e-discovery last year did not adequately preserve all the data.
On-premise expensive software and hardware based archives are less secure and more susceptible to tampering than cloud-based archives. The right cloud-based solution can be more secure than on-premise, reducing data touch points, one set of secure access credentials, and always allowing fast immediate access to all the stored data.
Aberdeen Group published findings in a recent study about Strategic Archiving Decisions: Retaining and Retrieving Important Company Information. The finance sector reported that the top pressures leading them to implement such [archiving] technology were to improve operational efficiency (44%, compared to all others at 34%), and to achieve compliance with regulations (33%, compared to all others 9%).
These findings match our experience with hosted email archiving; A majority (by greater than 10%) of new customers archive for compliance with storage management as the secondary consideration in their archive purchasing drivers.
“Time is money” – the age-old axiom is now relevant more than ever. More data to analyze, less time for the task, and now less budget money for IT.
Our product designers at Sonian Labs are working on some exciting new visualization techniques to help our hosted email archive audience search their unstructured data more efficiently.
The traditional e-discovery experience is to view a linear listing of documents that must be viewed one-by-one to determine relevance to the search request. Sonian is working on newer ways to evaluate the contents of the data set earlier in the process that allow reviewers to focus on the documents that are most important to the case and to eliminate those that have no relevance. Visualization techniques, lightning fast search, and a “time-machine” view of the data set will be a powerful combination of tools at your finger tips (and in your web browser.)
This not only helps with formulating a successful case strategy, but it can save a tremendous amount of time and money with e-discovery processing and review.
Get email updates:
