“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...” Email archiving, with its roots in the document management business, is an IT Tale of Two Cities, with all the force of tragedy that title implies.
It all started with document work-flow, or what I’ll call “business enablement” and sadly morphed into email archiving to protect the business and mitigate risks.
Driven by increased litigation and changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the legal aristocracy demanded a solution, and the IT industry responded with a monolith that has been imposed on the oppressed proletariat.
The result has not been pretty.
Document management started as a noble business with a strong value proposition around productivity. Systems accommodated the alignment of business processes and provided a way to share documents, collaborate, and manage document versions. Architecturally, this business capability was well-suited to a central repository model where everything that needed to be managed could be placed in a centralized location.
The industry was desperate for a quick fix to the smoking guns hidden in emails and realized that it could apply document management systems to plug the holes. But the email risk has proved to be a distributed problem, with exposure resident in laptops, handhelds, and even social media tools.
Shoving everything that's discoverable into an archive was a knee-jerk reaction to government regulations and litigation risks, and users are finding that the approach is a short-term strategy that doesn’t really support their e-discovery requirements all that well.
Centralized solutions are expensive, don't scale all that well, perform inconsistently, and suffer from rapid obsolescence as the problem gets too big for the original system to handle.
Where does that leave us? To answer that question, I ask you to consider four factors in your planning around the management of unstructured data risk:
1. Remain flexible. Stay open to adopting new technologies as they enter the market.
2. Use point products to fill holes. And set low expectations regarding simple, cost-effective integration.
3. Expect challenges. It won’t be easy servicing the needs of business lines, legal, records management, audit, and finance functions with a single, integrated solution.
4. Structure a governance process. Set it up around policies and retention, and seek tools that enable lifecycle management at the point where the data resides.
While difficult to do in this economy, organizations must take a more “telescopic” view when considering information risk. Otherwise the practices and tools you implement today will be inadequate to protect you tomorrow -- and the huddled masses will surely revolt.
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