By Mike Safar, Product Marketing Director, Information Governance, OpenText™
Information governance has been evolving for some time from simple records and document management to a broader, business outcome-centered approach that serves every constituent in the enterprise. Information governance is no longer solely about compliance; it has expanded to recognize the inherent value of information, the need for security, and the desire to support agility during organizational change and growth.
For decades, OpenText has embraced information governance as a core tenet of our Information Advantage approach. It’s a prime driver in not only determining the features and functions we include in our products, but also in the very products we offer and where we make our long-term investments.
Likewise, information governance can help organizations drive their own long-term investments, shifting costs related to the maintenance and storage of historical data toward more forward-looking digital transformation projects, while extracting previously unrealized value from that data.
One of the key elements of our information governance portfolio is OpenText InfoArchive. The InfoArchive solution is uniquely suited to the information governance needs of our customers as both a highly-scalable compliance store for both structured data (database and application data) and unstructured content (documents, files and media), all available in a cloud-enabled platform. Combined with the simple, yet flexible, search and browse interface of InfoArchive, customers benefit from deploying a centralized compliance store for:
- Active archiving of business-complete information to offload data from expensive storage or legacy applications
- Consolidation, compliance, and security of large information repositories such as file shares
- Improving ease of access to historical information for everyone from legal to LOB processes to data analysts
- Decommissioning of antiquated systems
- Consolidation of data centers
Some of these benefits may be derived from directed data archiving or migration projects. The most advantage, however, comes from taking a top-down, long-term approach that looks at data across the enterprise, and embraces all of the aspects of information governance.
Information Governance Reference Model from EDRM.net
Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways a comprehensive archiving strategy can help modernize and accelerate your information governance program.
“Set and forget” is not a compliance strategy
Compliance is not just about retention schedules. It involves new demands on security, encryption, access, transparency and defensibility requirements that change over time. Disruptive events such as acquisitions, changes in regulatory regimes, and even market conditions (such as new demands on data privacy) can influence organizational compliance requirements on a regular basis.
Older applications that may have been tuned to handle data retention may not have the flexibility required to adapt to all of these changes. InfoArchive provides a way to not only adjust to these changes with your data going forward, but also centralizes the management of the changes in a single, flexible repository.
Governance is also about access and realizing value
A simple, file-based archive that buries data in a monolithic silo for retention purposes may be a way to achieve compliance, but it comes with an unacceptable downside: Users that need access to the data for business purposes may be impacted with slower processes, imperfect information, and substandard customer service capabilities. These are unacceptable outcomes in the age of digital transformation.
InfoArchive takes a different approach. By treating structured data as a first-class data type, carefully preserving the relationships in the data, and serving each data type and application source individually, InfoArchive can preserve and even enhance business processes. Data fidelity is critical to many defensible compliance requirements, and by maintaining data integrity and access, custom processes and data analytics can make use of historical data going forward.
Discovery against legacy applications is expensive
In large organizations, ensuring access and providing collection capabilities for discovery requests can be an expensive process, sometimes involving dozens of employees inside and outside the organization wading through multiple active and inactive systems. Access to this data has to be maintained, and defensibility of the process often requires expert understanding of antiquated systems.
With InfoArchive, data integrity is maintained while discovery and collection processes are centralized, reducing the time and complexity of new discovery requests. Defensibility is retained as the archive becomes the system of record.
Don’t overlook archiving in your information governance strategy
Information governance planning often tends to focus on the security, classification, and long-term retention of unstructured data. These efforts are critical of course, and OpenText provides a complete suite of products to address these needs.
However, coping with compliance and governance of data residing in legacy applications presents not only an ongoing cost, but an increased risk as those systems are unable to keep up with changing compliance requirements.
OpenText InfoArchive lets your IT organization consolidate these costs in a single repository while maintaining information governance policies and increasing the value extracted from your legacy data.
Flatirons Digital Innovations specializes in data archiving and application decommissioning using OpenText InfoArchive. Learn more >
