You hear the words and phrases repeated in legal offices, data centers, break rooms, and boardrooms: liability, indemnity, retention, regulators, act of discovery, compliance. The discomforting sound of Information Governance contains echoes of cost, complexity, inconvenience, and potential penalties.
Why the Proactive Approach Wins
The cost and risk potential of operating without an Information Governance strategy is staggering. If you rely on routine backup to retain records, and don’t implement an organized Information Governance solution, you will pay; while employees or consultants sift laboriously through search results and backup tape after backup tape.
Backup simply protects you against disastrous data loss, but an Information Governance strategy organizes your data for retrieval, improving your company’s strategic planning as well as reducing liability insurance claims. For example, when your company receives a court order to present information, the governance solution should give you a proactive highly-customizable, well-designed workflow that delivers what your legal department needs in a timely way.
From the proactive viewpoint, then, investing in Information Governance is like buying additional insurance to cover claims that may raise your premiums. Moreover, escalating loss ratios may result in loss of insurance coverage. A claim every few years should cover the total cost of ownership for your Information Governance.
Other Inherent Benefits of Information Governance
Proactive Information Governance also lets you set company-specific policies that govern what content is retained, moved to a cloud archive or destroyed. For example, Information Governance allows you to indicate content that is clearly not business-related – such as invitations to lunch, menus for lunch, etc — and delete it so they are not retained unnecessarily. You also identify how long content should retained using ranges and which content should be kept based on size, attachment status, related business process, etc.
How long should you keep content? Content should be retained long enough to cover any potential demand for content under the laws and regulations that apply to your business. Your legal counsel, risk managers and auditors can help develop boundaries for this question. But even if your company is in a self-regulated industry or sector, you cannot afford to operate without Information Governance. Litigation due to perceived negligence may trigger a claim to your general liability or errors and omissions insurance.
According to Symantec’s 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey announced in October 2011, when litigation arises you may be required to produce database, social AND email correspondence dating back many years. You can protect your company and your insurance coverage by establishing an Information Governance plan.
In setting up your Information Governance solution, keep in mind that it should not penalize employees who need routine or occasional access to content being governed, e.g. monthly and quarterly P&L, employee exit interviews, changes to employee medical leave, etc. They should be able to find what they want using familiar tools, processes and software. The Information Governance strategy should also support migrating data to private cloud, such as Amazon S3, an OpSource Cloud powered by Mezeo or less expensive storage within your data facility. Expect and pay less for content that is generally not used or reviewed.
Key benefits of a Information Governance proactive approach:
- protects the company and its executives against the risks associated with legal or regulatory penalties and/or fines
- minimizes the risk of insurance premiums and insurability
- structures business content for rapid, routine retrieval
- may pay for itself in a single act of litigation or by deferring liability insurance claims
- reduce IT expenses by archiving to cloud storage or other low cost storage
In Summary: The Proactive Approach to Compliance Wins
Let’s be perfectly real about this. There is no silver bullet. No document, plan, product or suite of products will provide an Information Governance solution. Information Governance requires a corporate strategy, a mindset, and a commitment. But an effective plan mitigates doubt and concern about the effects of insurance claims, enables companies to respond with confidence legal inquires, may pay for itself rapidly when demands arise, and exposes opportunities for strategic information analytics. The proactive approach to Information Governance wins by turning obstacles and risks into opportunities.