BandL Weblog

eDiscovery Compliance Just Got Harder – Are You Ready?

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I don't want to alarm you, but eDiscovery just got harder.

That’s the main message in the results of a recent survey that found that e-mails are no longer the most commonly requested documents in eDiscovery requests. Files and documents now top the list of types of data companies must produce to meet eDiscovery requests, followed by database or application data. Other sources include SharePoint files, instant messages, text messages and social media.

What’s so tough about other data sources rising up the list and surpassing e-mail? For a while now, companies have viewed eDiscovery as primarily an e-mail management game. Now, as the Symantec survey indicates, it’s not quite that simple anymore. Today’s eDiscovery challenge, as these results highlight: how to produce requested information from across a broader range of disparate data sources—but to do so just as quickly as ever to avoid sanctions, fines and compromising your legal position and driving up costs by providing too much information.

Picture your staff spending hours over many days, weeks or even months manually poring through file systems looking for the required documents, e-mails, IMs and Tweets. Strategic projects would fall by the wayside as your burned-out staff labored at this mundane task under the pressure of knowing that the company’s legal butt was on the line—and that their efforts could make or break the case. Is the pain of this imagined predicament enough to send eDiscovery preparedness shooting up on your priority list?

Surprisingly, many companies remain woefully unprepared for an eDiscovery request, especially one that would require the company to pinpoint data from among such diverse and disparate data sources. Nearly half of respondents don’t have an information retention plan, and 14 percent don’t even have a plan to develop a plan.

Facing this challenge starts with having the right information management strategies in place—and the technology to back them up. Among other best practices, companies looking to be prepared for today’s more diverse eDiscovery requests need to:

• Implement an active, consistently enforced retention policy that covers all potential data sources, not just e-mail. The policy needs to specify not just what to keep and for how long, but how to systematically destroy data at the appropriate time.
  
  
• Cast a wider ESI (electronically stored information) net. Determine how you will capture, manage, store, backup and archive data from each and every potentially discoverable source.
  
  
• Deploy the right eDiscovery tools to defensibly collect and process data for review from these disparate sources.

Having the right eDiscovery strategy and tools can help you locate the right data (and only the right data) in a matter of minutes, rather than in days, weeks or not at all. As the survey report states, doing eDiscovery right can yield a 64 percent faster response time with a 2.3 times higher success rate. Especially in a large organization with frequent legal exposure, the case is closed on this one: Get your eDiscovery house in order, or prepare to face the consequences.

What is your companies policy concerning eDiscovery? Let us know your take in our comments section.

Data Loss Happens—It’s How You Recover that Matters

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More than half of the companies queried for the Cibecs 2011 Business Data Loss Survey have lost data already in 2011. And with a full quarter left in the year, that result has nowhere to go but up. As this survey highlights, the fact of the matter is that companies will continue to experience data crises. Hardware will continue to fail, humans will continue to err, natural disasters will inevitably strike, laptops and iPads will continue to go missing, viruses will keep attacking and users will fail to follow backup policies.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that we should just throw up our hands and wait for data to go missing. On the contrary, companies can and should limit their exposure to the risks of data loss through actions like keeping systems up to date, ensuring data integrity, enforcing and educating users on security and backup policies and more.

However, try as we might, we can’t eliminate the risk of data loss altogether. That’s where disaster recovery preparedness comes in. Having a fully tested disaster recovery plan is essential. And the foundation of that plan is data storage. Having a tiered data storage strategy that incorporates the right mix of storage media—from hosted cloud storage to offsite tape management solutions—can help ensure that your data is fully backed up and readily accessible for a restore when inevitably needed.

While storage can seem like a basic, mundane fact of IT life, in the end it’s largely your storage strategy that will determine whether and how quickly you can recover lost data. Not to mention how much it will cost to restore your data: The Cibecs study reports that the average cost of recovering from the loss or theft of a business laptop is $50,000. Sound steep? When you consider the indirect costs of data loss, like interrupted productivity and reputational damage, it starts to seem a little more realistic. The faster and easier your recovery, the bigger the bite you can take out of these costs as well.

DR planning and a well-thought-out storage strategy can help minimize the risks and consequences of unavoidable data loss. If the numbers from this study are any indication, the business world has a lot to gain by investing the time and dollars to ensure that these IT basics are rock-solid. Twenty-seven percent of the companies surveyed said it would take a full 24-hour day to recover lost data, and 10 percent said they would not be able to recover lost data at all. Imagine the impact of an event like this on your business. What would it mean in terms of sales, customer service, legal and compliance exposure—and maybe even your own job security? What can you do today to protect your data and your business from the inevitability of a data loss? This survey is a great reminder for all of us of how important it is to take those actions before it’s too late.

8 Strategies for an Efficient Post-Recession Data Center

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Just because the recession is officially over doesn’t mean it’s time to take the foot off the data center budget brake—not completely, anyway. Don’t get me wrong. The fact that data center spending is forecast to rebound to pre-recession levels and beyond—is good news. It means that companies are making some investments they might have delayed over the past couple of years. These investments not only will ensure that data centers are better meeting businesses’ growing performance needs—chief among them, the need to manage the data explosion—but also could help drive the economy. 

But even though a loosening of the purse strings is a good thing, we shouldn’t ignore the data center efficiency lessons we learned from the recession. There are things you can do to stay efficient without sacrificing effectiveness. Here’s a look at some of the strategies to consider as you reevaluate data center spending in this post-recession era, among others suggested by CIO.com and ServerWatch.com:

1. Power Efficiency: From greener designs to technology improvements like virtualization, companies have been making changes to limit power consumption growth dramatically over the past few years. For both the spending and environmental impacts, this is an effort that’s well worth continuing.
   
   
2. Virtualization: A single server hosting multiple virtual machines reduces power, cooling and hardware replacement costs.
   
   
3. Automation: Data center automation can streamline routine tasks and help IT shops function with the smaller staff sizes that have resulted from the recession.
   
   
4. Data Relocation: Relocating non-critical data can save on storage and lighten the load on the data center.
   
   
5. Standardization: Standardizing servers and storage makes it easier to manage resources efficiently and predict capacity.
   
   
6. Application Consolidation: Running fewer applications, if you can do so while still meeting the business needs, will cut costs.
   
   
7. Service Levels: Reducing availability requirements from 99.999 percent to 99.9 percent, for example, might produce some cost savings while still meeting business requirements. So might reducing data center hours of operation.
   
   
8. Offsite Storage or Hosting: Using tape stored in an offsite facility, leveraging the cloud or collocating servers can help you manage all of your data without growing internal data center capacity.

As the CIO.com article offered, many of these principles can help extend the life of your data center by up to several years, delaying the requirement to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a data center upgrade, expansion or relocation. Companies clearly have gotten smarter during the recession about how they manage their data centers, and there’s no reason to abandon these strategies and invest in an overhaul sooner than you have to.

When it comes to data center budgeting, cautiously optimistic is the way to go. While we may no longer need to pinch pennies quite as hard as we did back in 2008 and 2009, efficiency is still important. The key is to strike a balance between freely spending to optimize effectiveness and slashing costs to run as lean as possible. There may be a fine line between the two, and there’s no right answer. But with 2012 budgeting well underway in many organizations, these strategies can help you find that balance for your business. 

What is your take on data center budgeting? Are you finding that data center spending in organization is on the rebound?

The Volcker Rule: Will It Give Banks More Data to Manage?

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There’s yet another new banking regulation on the table—and this one’s making some waves. This time, the FDIC, SEC and other regulators are taking aim at how banks conduct their trading activity. The Volcker Rule—by far the most significant provision of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation passed last year—is designed to limit banks’ proprietary trading (trading conducted for the banks’ own profit and not on behalf of their clients). Proprietary trading is apparently a very profitable venture for many of our nation’s largest banks. They’ve been fighting the Volcker Rule tooth and nail, having spent a whopping $17.2 million just last year to lobby on the proposed regulation, according to The Hill.com.

Obviously, banks are up in arms about the Volcker Rule because they stand to lose some revenue as a result of its proposed restrictions. But banks are also resistant because the proposed regulation creates, according to the head of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s Washington office, “an overly complex and burdensome compliance regime.”

While no one’s talking specifically about the data impact yet, more compliance usually does mean more data to manage. The Volcker Rule likely will be no exception. The regulation spells out certain activities that are exempt from its proprietary trading ban. Demonstrating that their activities comply with the regulation requires banks to track information about each and every trade. For an industry that’s already struggling with how to manage seemingly infinite data stores, adding to that burden could be overwhelming.

The Volcker Rule was released last week in proposal form, is now open to public comment for 90 days and is slated to take effect in July. The banking industry is continuing to protest the Volcker Rule in its current form, and there’s no telling what the final product will look like. But one thing’s for sure: Once this new regulation takes effect, our clients and other firms in the financial services industry will need more than ever an affordable, easy-to-manage, long-term solution for storing all that data. With product and service offerings designed to help clients manage the ever-expanding data universe efficiently and effectively on tape, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the developments surrounding the Volcker Rule.

How Financial Services Can Seize the Big Data Opportunity

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The financial crisis sent some clear messages to the financial services industry. Among them: Get a better handle on your data. Now, in the supposed post-Great Recession era, banks and other financial institutions are being forced to do just that. And while getting a handle on their data is a truly onerous task for banks and other financial institutions, it’s more than that—it’s also a way to uncover some tremendous business opportunities.

 

To comply with new government regulations and public pressure (think Wall Street protests) to better manage their risk, financial services firms are capturing, tracking, managing and analyzing more and better data about consumers and the markets. They’re investing in the infrastructure and analysis tools needed to truly “get a handle” on their data. Clearly, this process is only just beginning. But it’s a start.

That’s the onerous part. But here’s where the opportunities come in. First of all, being forced to take a good, hard look at how they manage data is giving some banks the opportunity for a much-needed overhaul of their data management operations and structure. Turning the spotlight on data management practices is showing some organizations that there’s lots of room for improvement, and they’re cutting costs and increasing efficiency and effectiveness to meet the challenge.

Beyond the basics, all of this focus on data, coupled with new investments in world-class data management systems, is giving banks the opportunity to redeem themselves in the eyes of consumers by improving customer service. Why not use all that data to offer customers more personalized services based on their needs and behaviors, rather than just good-old-fashioned demographics? Why not offer more favorable pricing to the most low-risk, loyal customers, making them even more loyal?

Banks and other financial institutions also have the opportunity to turn their consumer data into revenue streams. Visa, for example, has put its “Big Data” to work in forecasting consumer trends. And here’s a great example of how banks are using consumer data to partner with retailers on customer incentive programs that are helping raise both revenue and customer loyalty.

The financial services industry has always had Big Data. And it’s only getting bigger as the entire industry is being forced to get its collective data warehouse in order, so to speak. The real winners will take it a step or two further and truly put their data to work for their business and their customers.

When It Comes to Storage Tiering, Money Is Everything

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If data storage were free, every bit and byte could be stored alike. All data could be considered part of a single high-priority tier, readily and speedily available at any given moment, until the end of time. But this scenario isn’t reality—nor would we want it to be. Storing masses of data in a single tier would become unmanageable for most businesses, not to mention present legal and security risks no business wants to deal with. Plus, storing all of that data—both low-value, inactive data and mission-critical, frequently used data—on the most expensive media would just be cost prohibitive. So what’s a business to do?

Many businesses are finding the answer in storage tiering. Storage tiering involves developing a hierarchy of data within an organization. The business classifies its data into tiers, assigning value to different data sets based on criteria like performance and retention requirements and business value. The different tiers are then assigned to different storage media and systems in a way that lets the organization store all of its data as cost efficiently as possible. Customer records accessed daily? Assigned to a higher tier with higher-cost storage media and systems. Data kept for extended time periods for compliance purposes but perhaps never again accessed? Classified into a lower tier with lower-cost storage media and systems. Add an active archive front end to the mix, and you gain the ability to access offline content as if it were online, making all of your content accessible but storing it all as inexpensively as possible.

Storage tiering takes full advantage of the strengths of both disk and tape, particularly the economics of tape. As the most cost-effective long-term storage medium, tape is perfect for the masses of data that must be stored over the long term. With tiered storage, companies can store only the most frequently accessed data on disk for speed and performance. The rest of the firm’s data—which makes up the vast majority, an estimated 80 percent of data stores—can be stored on low-cost, reliable, energy-efficient, easy-to-manage tape. 

Thinking about making the shift to storage tiering, adjusting your existing tiering hierarchy or adding a new automated tiering tool in your enterprise? You might want to check out this podcast for some best practices. With the world’s data doubling every two years and 1.8 zettabytes being created and replicated this year alone, you’ll want to evaluate how you can best put tiering to work for your business. Get it right, and results like running applications four to 10 times faster, cutting storage costs by 71% and reducing storage administration time by half could be in your future.