Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: David Floyer
In the last six months our interactions with Wikibon members have highlighted the increasing role of e-mail archiving in storage planning and budgeting and ultimately the determination of the role storage will play in business. Over that time we have seen a growing emphasis on minimizing business exposure to sometimes frivolous-seeming but potentially very expensive lawsuits focusing on the degree to which the organization successfully secures and manages its email archiving systems. This has focused corporate legal concern on increasing control of how e-mail data is sustained and erased, based on sound business rules.
However we believe this is just a first phase of activity in the area of archiving unstructured data. The concern over liabilities resulting from the inability of corporations to produce relevant e-mail required by the courts is already leading to the formation of better e-mail practices. Over the next few years this concern will drive the creation of active archives that will be able to sustain complex, high-quality applications focused on information asset and liability management. We expect this focus to broaden beyond e-mail to include other forms of unstructured data. We are already seeing the appearance of automated tooling for archiving any unstructured data, supporting the transfer of practices developed for e-mail to other unstructured data domains typically associated with the same quality of metadata.
This concern about liability will dominate many of the discussions about storage administration funding and direction in the next few years. Eventually businesses will expect storage administrators to create a unified unstructured data archive management environment supporting active archives against which high value applications can run to provide critical business capabilities. We expect the emergence of a new class of experts within business focused on aggregate considerations of information asset value and liability negation. This new “records management” function will work closely with storage administration but will probably be independent of it, working more closely with overall business operations.
The implications of the concern about litigation and the technical evolution it drives also has important implications for how storage administrative functions are performed and sourced from third parties. On the one hand, this creates a significant opportunity for outsourcers who make themselves experts in the technical side of creating, documenting and implementing administrative controls on storage that mitigate the risk for customers. Many organizations will have a difficult time keeping up with the technical and architectural developments of active archiving and will be happy to turn this problem over to expert service suppliers. On the other, corporations will be concerned about what the third-party will do in the event that a judge threatens it directly with liability if it does not turn over all requested documents immediately.
Action item: Storage administrators in the midst of efforts to gain control over e-mail archiving applications will find themselves in an arms race with external legal groups who regard these archives as a potential gold mine for claims. The only way to gain control in this race is to work closely with operations and transfer knowledge gained in the e-mail domain to other unstructured data domains in ways that foster the emergence of overall integrated processes, controls and solutions for creating, administrating and managing active archives.
