Data retention, FOI and the storage budget

Asking yourself those two questions is vital. You'll never achieve what you need without understanding your requirements first. That's basic project management however is something I've seen many people struggle over when presented with ShinyGadget Retention and Compliance Version 2.1; they end up led by the research.

To keep storage costs down, we apply mailbox quotas. That means items which are not only business-relevant however could be contractually sensitive or pertain to someone's education end up being deleted in user-driven mailbox culls; these should be retained. Keeping them means remembering the "only keep data which is pertinent and necessary" directive from the DPA, together as remembering that FoI dictates that if you've kept it, you might need to reveal it at some point henceforth.

The important things?

Just the "important" things? Great idea, however who decides what is importan? You need to understand your statutory obligations, industry best practice, and internal business policies, and how they differ across sections of the organisation.

Only when you've covered that will you be in a position to talk to the vendors who are afterwards your business. You will understand - maybe not specifically, nevertheless better than when you started - what and why you need to retain.

The classification approach

With the classification approach, you can define the amount of time you keep certain types of documents, transaction data, when all is said and done on, which allows you to get rid of data once the prerequisite time has passed. How you classify depends on your business, and it is not always necessary to be exhaustive. A lot can be achieved, for instance, by simply identifying data that does not need to be kept at all, or which may be discarded afterwards a short period of time.

Often, nevertheless, all that in effect needs to be kept is the final version. Similarly, the need to hang on to correspondence and copies of other forms of communication leading up to a final document or transaction will vary immensely depending on the industry and specific scenario. By understanding these differences and putting appropriate policies in place, backed up by solutions just as workflow and document management systems, the volume of data to be stored can again be reduced.

The same time on storage will not only reduce cost

It is as well worth bearing in mind that getting your act at the same time on storage will not only reduce cost and risk, however increase the chances of users to tell the truth being able find the data they need to make business decisions, so benefits extend so then beyond the IT department.

Every industry has its own requirements around data retention periods, some healthcare records need to be stored for up to 25 years, some for no more than six years, finance, child protection, military, pharma and elsewhere have in a class by itself requirements including permanent retention. Laying those requirements to one side because of their complex and in a class by itself nature let's think about the research we have at our disposal.

There is a lot to think about with regards to archival of email however it on the whole incurs costs that the business doesn't like to think about because it rarely generates revenue. Cloud services offer quite a clever way of sidestepping some of the costs because the infrastructure is managed for you. Office 365 offers the Exchange Online Archiving Service which can archive an on-premises Exchange 2010 infrastructure to the cloud.

King'sCollege London case study revealing how they were able to reduce data analysis from days to hours using IBM System Networking innovation.

Tolly test report - IBM System Networking RackSwitch G8264 comparison evaluation against three competing 10GbE switches.

Short time ago are now commonplace

Latency measurements that were unachievable just a short time ago are now commonplace, this paper looks at how this network innovation has evolved.