Author: Chuck Cook

An Omaha city employee recently gained unwanted public visibility after they sent twelve filing cabinets containing a hundred years of irreplaceable original building permits from the basement of City Hall to the county dump. It turns out that the head of the permits and inspections division decided to get rid of the cabinets as part of cleaning out its basement storage area. They did not realize that other city employees regularly pulled the permits, which dated from the 1880s through the 1980s. They were also apparently unaware that a local preservation group was developing a plan to move the permits to a new facility in order to make the permits more secure and accessible to the public.
Like Omaha’s City Hall, businesses often face what appear to be incompatible priorities. IT departments are expected to keep spending in check and know that only 10-20 percent of data is ever accessed after 60 days of its creation. But knowing which data to keep available and which data to delete or archive can be a challenge. This type of dilemma is one of many drivers in the development of a new group of storage systems–public cloud gateways.