Johan Scheepers, Technical Services Director, Middle East, South Africa and Turkey, Commvault, assesses the importance of efficient data management – especially in the case of email archiving.
While regulatory mandates are not a new concept, the pressure, cost and effort to sustain data compliance has now reached a new level of importance. Regulators have been pressuring companies to comply with the rules that govern the storage and archiving of emails – especially when dealing with personal private information – prompting the necessity for new solutions in data compliance.
With the onset of Big Data and the ensuing requirement of handling large data streams over the past decade, new methods of assisting compliance are now in development across the market with the aim of transforming business procedures.
New data management approaches offer the critical initial discovery phase that help organisations identify the business sensitivity and potential compliance risk of all data it owns before structuring it in an accessible and easily used database of strategic information.
Many businesses have yet to reach a stage where they are able to make the best use of their stored data for more effective compliance. Compliance leaders across all sectors have been presented with the challenge of determining what data to measure, as well as how to measure it.
The data compliance solutions available to companies who are currently engaged with data overhauls are varied and numerous. While compliance requirements will vary across industries, businesses now recognise the need to analyse data regarding not only compliance obligations, but also how to generate a competitive advantage from the results of their compliance function.
The key pillars of an effective data compliance solution involve a number of contributing factors. One of these vital features is the use of intelligent information access and management, allowing managers to protect their businesses while saving costs by providing an avenue through which organisations can rapidly respond to regulatory compliance and legal discovery requests. Unstructured and previously untagged dark data can then be leveraged to create informed and strategic business decisions, ensuring that the business becomes more productive and more efficient across its departments.
An additional contributing factor to an effective data compliance solution involves the use of an integrated platform for functions such as enterprise search and eDiscovery, securing fast and seamless accessibility to required data when companies need it most. A study by Osterman has revealed that as many as 55 percent of organisations have been ordered to produce email by a court or regulatory body.
Rather than hiring an external body to sort through an entire data set to find this information, an effective data compliance solution ensures the availability of preliminary case assessments that will refine data sets and enable you to exchange only the information required under a guarantee of accuracy and safety.
A third fundamental aspect of an efficient data compliance solution is the availability of an effective email archiving system. Proactive data compliance necessitates the ability to seamlessly navigate large data streams. IDC found that 60 percent of critical information for businesses is stored in email; in other words, it is critical for email storage to be appropriately accessible and structured. An adaptive email archiving strategy secures business continuity and the ready availability of critical information.
