The massive volume of content and information in organizations is a problem that’s not going away. Without an archiving strategy,
businesses face high storage costs, legal and regulatory risks, and incomplete compliance due to inefficient technology.
While the costs associated with slow response times and wasted resources are important, what’s more critical from an information management perspective are the acute business risks and liabilities that can impact your organization’s competitiveness and bottom line. A successful archiving program must factor in these four key risks:
1. Keeping too much: Seventeen percent of business leaders say they don’t want to throw any content away—and 14 percent say they don’t have a defined retention strategy, so they just go ahead and save everything, according to the Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2013, from Forrester Research, Inc. The increasing number of compliance requirements and litigation events mean organizations are saving all kinds of enterprise information. But without an archiving strategy, businesses are keeping too much information,
leading to exorbitant storage costs and enormous amounts of time lost to sifting through mountains of data. Leading enterprises need to structure, classify,
and retain essential business information and official records in a way that makes it easy to access data and respond to audits, legal requests, and electronic investigations.
2. Keeping too little: A defensible deletion strategy ensures the right information is kept for the right amount of time and on the right level of storage, helping organizations manage the lifecycle of data and ensuring the retrieval of complete, accurate records. There’s a fine balance between keeping too much and not keeping enough. As content ages, it needs to transition into an enterprise archive where it can be managed for appropriate access and sharing.
3. Legal compliance: Organizations face a number of complex and evolving compliance requirements. If an eDiscovery or legal hold request can’t be met quickly or thoroughly, it leads to a long,
incomplete, and frustrating process involving more people than are needed. Robust archiving solutions incorporate all types of enterprise information from a variety of sources, helping reduce storage and management costs, mitigate legal risks, and ensure compliance.
4. Regulatory liabilities: Every business sector faces compliance regulations, but some—such as financial services,
healthcare, and energy—face more than others. Organizations are at serious risk if they do not archive all their electronic content in compliance with regulatory, legal, and industry best practices.
Best-in-class enterprises are turning to robust archiving solutions to handle all types of information in one repository,
making it easier to manage and less costly to operate. Information becomes simple to find, response times are improved, and the time and costs involved with eDiscovery requests are significantly reduced.
Learn more about archiving and discover the four steps to a successful archiving strategy in the white paper, File Archiving: The Next Big Thing or Just Big?
