As the cost of storage continues to fall, some organisations are tempted to retain all of the information within their business ‘just in case’. But the cost of storage shouldn’t be your only, or your main consideration. The cost of managing that stored information across its life cycle can be astronomical – for example, managing a terabyte of data costs in the range of $14,000 to $17,000.
When the amount of information within your organisation can be doubling on an annual basis, you can see why the expense of information storage and retention should be addressed.
It is not only budgets that are potentially compromised by this explosion of information:
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Under Performance
With so much unmanaged information throughout the organisation, the performance of IT systems and applications can be affected and access to information slow for business users, which impacts productivity in the business.
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Misalignment
There is often poor alignment between the life cycles of Records Management and IT. Digital information with long-term preservation and retention requirements out-lives the storage media where it resides. Hardware, software and media obsolence causes information to be migrated between storage platforms of different types and formats. This puts the access, accuracy and the retention of legacy information at risk.
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Lower ROI
IT investments tend to be time-based. It is important to recognise that deploying new storage technologies and techniques such as virtualisation and Cloud-based storage will not provide the optimum ROI when there is so much unmanaged, often unnecessary information present in the company.
Information Governance, Information Storage and Retention
In an Information Governance survey 80% of respondents believed that over half of their information would be disposed of once an effective Information Governance platform was in place. The ability to defensibly dispose of the bulk of valueless and unnecessary structured and unstructured data in corporate systems frees capacity, and can extend the lifetime of current IT storage investments. Information Governance for Information Storage and Retention should:
- Identify all structured and unstructured data that the organisation has responsibility for
- Ensure that as few instances as possible of information are held and all others are defensibly disposed of
- Ensure that information is properly tagged and classified so that it can automatically progress through its life cycle
- Ensure that extensive capacity planning and management takes place to ensure storage resources are properly utilised
- Identify and remove all redundant applications, systems and hardware at the earliest possible point.
Key Areas to Consider
The Desktop
Many organisations already institute policies that all information is held centrally, but there are still many instances where users are creating and storing information locally. One of the major culprits for the explosion of information is email. Users may receive hundreds of emails every day – some of which are forwarded to others in the company. Many instances of the same email can be stored in different mailboxes. Most of these are unnecessary. When information such as emails are deleted it is either time-based, or the decision of the user, rather than as part of a considered and centralised information management programme.
Data Centre
An Information Governance programme will allow the Data Centre to identify and remove obsolete systems and applications. This will reduce the amount of information held in the Data Centre as well as put information where it can be best situated to deliver secure access when required. By automating a good deal of the information lifecycle, it can make data handling more effective in areas such as transferring from online to offline storage and deleting information at end-of-life.
Digital Media
Media-rich content is a growth area and represents a huge increase in file size. This information – even if it is externally hosted on YouTube or Instagram – still needs to be managed. Companies are producing far more media-rich content such as webinars and websites that require standard Records Management techniques applied. Although there is little external regulation so far, organisations need to have their own retention strategies for this media including how and when it is archived and deleted.
Bring Your Own Device
BYOD is growing within most organisations. The ability for employees to use their personal devices for corporate purposes places a greater onus on companies to manage and control the information on those devices. A general rule of thumb should be that as little corporate information as possible resides on these devices. It should, as quickly as possible, be placed behind the corporate firewall. This requires setting out policies about how information is created, processed and transferred onto corporate services. The organisation should also have remote back-up for all devices as well as remote data retrieval and cleaning in case a device is lost or stolen.
The Cloud
Many organisations receive IT services from a Cloud-based provider. This has many benefits, including reducing costs and supporting internal operations and management in a company. It also provides a range of information storage challenges. The confidentiality and security of corporate data has to be assured. There can be issues of data ownership and the jurisdictional regulations of where the data physically resides may need consideration. Questions to be answered include: What happens in the event of a disaster? How secure is the data? How quickly can it be restored? Many Cloud-providers offer massive redundancy which, while good for data safety, may adversely affect an organisation’s environmental policy.
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