Today, many if not most organizations use an information management approach that shoves everything that's potentially risky (e.g. e-mails) into a centralized archive. By centralizing content, organizations can (in theory) more easily search, discover, and purge key corporate information assets. Frequently, in certain industries, many of these assets aren't purged and are kept 'forever' because organizations are often afraid to delete sensitive data for fear of litigation down the road. Moreover, often when data is thought to be deleted, it isn't because it 'lives' in other locations - i.e. on user laptops, mobile devices, or in collaborative and social media tools.
New cloud metadata models can be used to identify information about information and eliminate huge amounts of 'stuff' by enabling the defensible deletion of unneeded or unwanted data. By investigating the metadata, organizations can more quickly and efficiently determine what data needs to be purged and this process can be automated by leveraging metadata automation strategies.
At the 11/2/2010 Peer Incite Research Meeting, Tom Coughlin and Mike Alvarado introduced the concept of a 'Guardian Angel' which can strengthen the defensible deletion of information assets. The advantage of the Guardian Angel - which is software that observes user and machine interactions, is that it can automatically create metadata 'on the fly' at the point of creation or use - such that information can be auto-classified and subsequently acted upon.
However organizations today lack robust metadata management capabilities that would enable the proactive management and defensible deletion of certain corporate information assets. The opportunity exists for organizations to expand their scope of metadata management and clearly define, organize, manage, and exploit metadata to explicitly initiate strategies for getting rid of unwanted/unneeded data on a proactive and automated basis.
Action Item: The promise of automated and defensible deletion of risky or unwanted corporate assets has been the holy grail of information management. New metadata models are emerging that expand the notion of metadata, specifically accommodating cloud computing and collaboration whereby metadata is automatically created and classified upon data creation and use. Organizations must begin to refine metadata management models with an explicit goal of automating the deletion of unwanted/unneeded information assets defensibly. This approach will dramatically decrease the risk of cloud adoption and support new business models that are emerging around both public and private cloud computing.
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