Search results matching tag 'Compliance Archiving'

Structured Records Management - Taking control of the structured data

uraas — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:16:00 GMT

In my last post I spoke about how the transfer of structured data from the source system into the records management system works. Now that we have covered this step, lets look at some of the special features that you want to manage structured data as records.

Like any other record, you want to be able to preserve the authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability of the data. The authenticity is maintained by the system storing an audit trail of the whole transfer process and any subsequent actions taken on the records. The reliability is based on the collaboration of application owners and records managers in the definition and classification of the structured records model, which means that the transferred data is based on a design by people who know all the facts about its source and usage.

That leaves me to elaborate a bit more about the integrity and usability.

The structured records get transferred into the records management environment as XML files. Each transfer batch is a self contained group, consisting of a number of XML files that contain the data and a summary XML file that contains a detailed description of what the data files contain. To be able to use the data and the summary file in future, each of them is described by a XML schema definition. All of these files together form a single package and the records management rules are applied at the package level, meaning that the same security and retention rules apply to all files of a single transfer. The integrity of the individual files can be proved at any stage based on hash comparison technology between the summary and the data files.

Usability means that the structured data is not lost once it resides in the records management environment. Text indexing can be used to provide searching across the contents of the XML files to find batches that include data pertinent to a particular circumstance, e.g. all batches that contain customer number XYZ or order number 123. This is the kind of full text searching that people use across all machine readable formats as part of early searches in the e-discovery or freedom of information processes. However, structured records should also be available to other methods of searching, e.g. for reporting engines. Having the data in XML format with a full schema description allows us to use our Record Query Server to create an ODBC data source pointing to the XML files, which can then be used by a whole variety of SQL query tools - this is a distinct advantage that you get from storing structured records as XML data, rather than as flat text file or PDF formatted report output. If the original application still exists, and its algorithms are desirable in the analysis of the data, the records management system provides a re-load function to send the XML based data back to the original source database schema.

In all our design of HP TRIM functionality we pay attention to the characteristics of records as prescribed by ISO 15489: authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability, and as you can see, structured records management is no exception. By adhering to this principle we are able to create a truly unified records management environment, encompassing all formats of information, physical, electronic, unstructured and structured, meaning that you can apply a single set of consistent records management policies across all your enterprise content.

Email Management?

pateiten — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:22:00 GMT

By Noel Rath

AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) has produced an excellent report from their survey on "Email Management - the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (© AIIM 2009, www.aiim.org) -- available at www.aiim.org/emailmanagement2009.

Here are some of the key findings.

On average, our respondents spend more than an hour and a half per day processing their emails, with one in five spending three or more hours of their day.
“Sheer overload” is reported as the biggest problem with email as a business tool, followed closely by “Finding and recovering past emails” and “Keeping track of actions”.
Email archiving, legal discovery, findability and storage volumes are the biggest current concerns within organizations, with security and spam now considered less of a concern by our respondents.
Over half of respondents are “not confident” or only “slightly confident” that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable.
Only 10% of organizations have completed an enterprise-wide email management initiative, with 20% currently rolling out a project. Even in larger organizations, 17% have no plans to, although the remaining 29% are planning to start sometime in the next 2 years.
Some 45% of organizations (including the largest ones) do not have a policy on Outlook “Archive settings” so most users will likely create .pst archive files on local drives.
Only 19% of those surveyed capture important emails to a dedicated email management system or to a general purpose ECM system. 18% print emails and file as paper, and a worrying 45% file in nonshared personal Outlook folders.
A third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery, 40% would likely have to search back-up tapes, and 23% feel they would have gaps from deleted emails. Only 16% have retention policies that would justify deleted emails.

SourceOne customer speaks, but HP IAP customers boast

Lisa Dali — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:49:00 GMT

An EMC customer has spoken about the new SourceOne suite, saying:

EMC’s solution is not the cheapest.
They wonder if they’ve over-bought.
They’d like to see EMC add support for end-user access to the archive through mailboxes.

HP customers speak louder: Here’s what HP IAP customers are saying about HP’s comprehensive solution:Brunel University: “What we have [with HP IAP] is effectively the best 'find' button on the internet! Beyond just efficiency, the solution has helped Brunel further enhance its reputation for corporate integrity, and you simply can't put a price on that.”Coscon: “The software and hardware integrated solution delivered by HP has not only mitigated the risks we faced, but also helped us to realise real-time mail data management in an effective manner within a short period of time.”Dubai International Financial Centre: “With the HP IAP we have peace of mind knowing that we can be in full compliance with legal and financial regulations. It has made it far easier for us to retrieve any email we need— we can now do it in minutes.”

Compliance concerns resulting from cross-border litigation

pateiten — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:13:00 GMT

By Patrick Eitenbichler

On April 7th, the Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal published a great article written by Brandon Cook, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Clearwell Systems.

Brandon describes how the increasing number of business transactions across borders leads to more litigation, government inquirires, and compliance audits spanning international boundaries. Using a number of real-life examples, he shows the implications and then provides recommendations on how to get prepared for cross-border e-discovery.

Take a read: "Why Cross-Border Litigation is a Compliance Concern"

EMC's new services: Not new to HP customers

Lisa Dali — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:08:00 GMT

The EMC announcement of the SourceOne suite includes new consulting services to help customers develop information policies which align with business goals and regulatory requirements.

HP already provides customers with regulatory compliance services, such as compliance and e-discovery workshops, information discovery and classification, business value analysis and requirements development, compliance and data policy assessment, and information policy definition. Furthermore, the May 2008 acquisition of EDS enables HP to deliver a broad portfolio of information technology, applications and business process outsourcing services to clients in manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, retail industries, and government. In fact, HP recently increased its Information Management Services headcount by 10X, to further meet the needs of its customers.

EMC announcement: More like "PromiseOne"

Lisa Dali — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:51:00 GMT

On April 2, 2009 EMC finally announced the long-awaited replacement of EmailXtender. No surprise. Actually, it looks like they tried to announce it on April 1 and then pulled all the links—perhaps it was feared it would be seen as an April Fool’s joke. What isn’t a joke is that this product, called SourceOne Email Management, is actually not a one-source archive solution—yet. Like its predecessor, it does still archive one overall type of content: messaging. EMC says that later this year they will release file, XML, and SharePoint archiving. So, that’s when it will be “one source”? Not exactly. Why? Because the SourceOne product family is not integrated. Give them twelve to eighteen months—hey, they promised after all.

Bottom line: EMC’s announcement does not compare to the breadth and range of HP’s current offerings, and EMC is more than six months late to market with a product that does not even fulfill what they previously communicated to customers in terms of their key archiving needs. Furthermore, the release of SourceOne Email Management is a replacement for EmailXtender, and what EMC is delivering with this release is a mere promise of what this product could become in the next year to eighteen months. In these economic times, we need more than promises to show ROI like what HP IAP customers have been achieving for more than four years:

--Improving staff productivity by up to 80%, and email- and file-based productivity by over 34%

--Lowering email and document processing, review, and production costs by up to 90%

--Reducing time needed to analyze email and documents from weeks to minutes

--Achieving control of their corporate data, improving information governance

To Stub Or Not To Stub, That Is The Question…

pateiten — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:57:00 GMT

By André Franklin

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of convenient mailbox message stubs,
Or accept the clean simplicity of stub-less archiving…

… well… that is the question…

Ok…enough Shakespeare. What are you talking about?

When email archiving is performed to enable better email management, HP calls it selective archiving. In a word, selective archiving removes mail messages from mailservers. There are two popular selective archiving methods to manage mailservers:

with stubs
without stubs

So… what is a stub?

A stub is a substitute for a mailbox message that has been removed from a mailserver and placed into a dedicated archive. A stub contains a link to the original message and attachments that reside in the archive. The stub allows the original message and attachments to be retrieved from the archive through a user’s mailbox.

Only after messages are safely archived are they removed from the mailserver. Users remain within their mailbox quota limits as mailserver messages are deleted. This whole process improves email performance and reduces mailserver backup headaches. Assuming archive storage is lower cost per MB than Tier 1 mailserver storage, there are clear capital expenditure benefits for selective archiving.

(Note: archiving strictly for compliance purposes never uses stubs, but compliance archiving can be performed in addition to a selective archiving strategy).

What do I gain with each approach?

Stubbing:

A stubbed representation appears in the same place in a user’s mailbox as the message it represents. It allows for a single integrated list of both mailbox and archived messages. Stub messages are very small in comparison to the messages they replace. When used with policies that automatically remove, archive, and “stub” messages (often based on message age), users can experience a sense of “infinite mailbox”, and without the massive mailbox capacity that would give some mail administrators a heart attack.

Not-Stubbing:

There is no possibility or “stubbing” software causing problems with the mail client. Mail messages and messages classes are not modified. Archived messages that have been removed from mailserver mailboxes are presented to users as a special “archive folder” (no view of mailbox messages).

We’ll look at more of the benefits and “gotchas” of each approach in my next post.

Go Green; Retire Those Old Energy-Hogging Apps!

kpomalley — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:39:00 GMT

by Mary Caplice

I was reading an article today from Forrester (‘Q&A: The Economics Of Green IT’) about how companies can not only save money by going green, there may also be government incentives and utility company programs to help them. They may even incur penalties in some regions for not going green in certain areas. This article suggests that there are very compelling reasons for IT leaders to educate themselves on local incentives and penalties. Some green projects require an upfront cost that will pay off later, some require none. For example, GE expects to save millions just by turning on Windows features like standby and hibernate! IT can save capital and operating expenses, cooling costs, DBA time, facility square footage and license fees for both hardware and software by retiring applications that are being kept alive in case they’re needed down the road for regulatory and compliance reasons. There’s even a secondary market for that retired hardware! One way to go about application retirement is to invest in HP Database Archiving software (excellent ROI potential is discussed in my recent blog ‘Death and Taxes- Maybe one can be avoided’).

Ignore it but it won’t go away!

kpomalley — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:33:00 GMT

By Mary Caplice

Although we’re all experiencing the effects of a worldwide downturn in the economy, organizations are finding that there are certain things they can’t ignore and wait until the economy improves. They’re finding that they have no choice but to invest time and technology in reducing costs and risks associated with both increasing data retention regulations and the ability to quickly and efficiently answer legal discovery requests. This problem is of course most concentrated in highly regulated industries such as Insurance, Financial Services and pharmaceuticals.

HP Database Archiving customers are finding that investing in our technology in these areas can really pay off!

IAP Retention Management – Future Ideas

pateiten — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:24:00 GMT

By Ronald Brown

Today, the HP Integrated Archive Platform (IAP) manages retention at the “archive level” – meaning the archive itself is not only responsible for executing the retention management functionality, but it is also the place where the retention settings are configured. This means the “archive” administrator has the responsibility to maintain the system in accordance with a company’s record retention strategies. This is certainly one approach, however, there are others which may give more flexibility.

As the number of applications that move data into an archive grows, it becomes more important to actually understand the business value of that data and to provide more flexible retention policies. Perhaps the owners of the application data itself should be able to communicate their requirements to the IT personnel responsible for their data. In this case the application itself should drive the retention policies. This will help ensure that the retention policies are specific to the application and maintained by the application experts. The archive itself will be the executor of these policies. While this affords more flexibility, the downside is that it requires more attention in order to define these policies and maintain them – so sometimes a blanket policy works better, especially for customers who are reluctant to commit the time and effort involved in defining their corporate retention strategy in a granular manner.

Another interesting use case is where the archive only retains data that is under active investigation or discovery. Here, the archive is loaded with, for instance, 3 years of corporate data. Then, specific queries are performed and the resultant data sets are placed on hold. After this process is completed, all data not on hold is released and removed from the archive. This use case serves a specific customer base very well – even though it seems to defeat the intended purpose of the archive.

One can never “predict” what is best for a customer and how they will utilize their technology investments. The key is to give enough flexibility so that all use cases can be explored.