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.
On average most mid-sized companies are not bothering with Information Management as a means to mitigate e-discovery costs. That is a conclusion reached by comparing Symantec’s 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey announced in October 2011 with the research completed by King and Spalding, LLP for the Duke Law Journal December 2010.
Over the years big data has crept into the everyday life of systems administrators. Attempts to solve the big data problem in both block and file storage emerged as data management software. While data management software struggled to get a footing, deduplication and compression took off stunting data management software’s growth.
Deduplication and compression technologies have well known capabilities in both the storage and information disciplines. However, they differ in a significant way. These technologies do not ease the burden of information management.
The situation confronting a VMware and Windows architect that I recently spoke with is probably one to which many system administrators can relate. On one hand, he had a requirement to make patches and updates to his company’s systems to keep them in compliance with PCI DSS regulations. On the other, making such changes could result in system downtime and disrupt his company’s operations (i.e. – stop its flow of income.) To resolve it, he turned to a new technology called the Thin Capture appliance from Kubisys.
When it comes to implementing any form of data reduction (compression or deduplication) on primary storage, many companies are still reticent to do so. So it was with some interest that I spoke to Mike Power, the CEO of Neuxpower, whose company is having success in not just delivering data reduction of files on primary storage but doing so leveraging lossy technology.
Upon arriving at Symantec Vision on Wednesday morning, it quickly became evident that the messaging at this year’s event focused on how the business world is shifting from a Systems-Centric View (policies and governance is done according to the physical devices on which they reside such as servers, networking and storage) of data management to an Information Centric View (policies and governance are set independent of what storage device on which the data resides).
I am playing the role of road warrior this week by attending two conferences. The first two days of this week I was attending Storage Networking World (SNW) 2010 in Orlando, FL, and then today I hopped on a direct flight Las Vegas to catch one day of the Symantec Vision conference.
Last week’s blog took a look at the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. This week I wanted to step even further back and reflect upon the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 regardless of when they were written as I find this insightful in two ways. It lets me know what information continues to hold the attention of readers on as well as what topics from the past might become new trends in 2010. So while there is definitely some overlap between the two, there are also some entries that appear on this list that knock some of the top 10 blogs from last week off the list.
Obama’s administration allocated $17B of the recent (Feb 09) stimulus spending package to healthcare, for the purpose of building better healthcare infrastructure. The goal of the new infrastructure is to move patient records online and enable a ubiquitous Electronic Health Record (EHR) to be shared universally among hospital systems. Obama himself promised a total of $50B in spending for this purpose during his campaign. Some experts believe that even more is to come. But, now that some of the money is allocated, how are healthcare institutions getting access to it and what are they doing with it?
A recent virtual eDiscovery roundtable that I participated in highlighted the difficulties that companies are having in getting their arms around the proliferation of electronically stored information (ESI) in their organization. This is especially true when one considers the growth of social media and how it can negatively impact them going forward. One attorney participating in the roundtable even went so far to say that, “We have lost control in regards to blogs, wikis and newer forms of social media.” Thankfully the news is a little bit better in regards to the management of older, more mature forms of social media such as email but challenges still remain.
Thank you for your interest in DCIG research and analysis.
Please sign up for the free DCIG Newsletter to have new analysis delivered to your inbox each week.
