IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: How to Overcome the “6 Second Rule” When It Comes to Electronically Stored Information (ESI)

The majority of today’s organizations, regardless of size or vertical, has an ever growing mountain of electronically stored information (ESI). Much of this ESI remains under the purview of each individual employee to manage. Of course, this can introduce a host of business, legal and/or regulatory challenges and risks. Today, we speak with Bill Tolson, Vice President of Marketing for Archive360 on this important topic.

• Q: What do you view as the key challenges today’s IT professionals are facing in regards to the capture, management and archiving of all of the various applications and information spread across their organization?
  

A: Much of enterprise unstructured data is unmanaged by the organization and is usually left to the individual employee to address. Most employees do not have the bandwidth or time to actually consider each file and determine if it should be retained and for how long. Most follow the “6-second rule” – If it takes them more than 6 seconds to determine if it should be retained and for how long, they will simply delete it or keep it forever. This highlights the real issues companies face – there is too much ESI (electronically stored information) and not enough time to manage it.

• Q: While the benefits of the cloud are undeniable, do you think these challenges can be exacerbated when trying to move, manage and storage data there — especially long-term?

A: Some cloud-based information management solutions offer connectors to popular storage repositories within the enterprise to offer automatic data migration to cloud repositories. Cloud information management/archives offer policies with these connectors that act as an agent to automatically move data to the cloud based on age, custodian, and content. This capability automates the entire migration and data management process.

• Q:  You recently launched a solution to address these challenges, can you tell us about it?

A: Archive2Azure is a native Microsoft Azure-based platform which enables companies to automatically move all types of data, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured to their Microsoft Azure Cloud tenancy where it is actively managed, secured, and made available by Archive2Azure.

The fact that the customer’s data is stored and managed in their Azure account removes the issues associated with proprietary 3-party cloud archives – expensive, very hard and expensive to move away from that vendor’s cloud, and possible data conversion that puts the data at risk for eDiscovery and regulatory compliance.

Archive2Azure includes eight customizable solution modules which span various data types which allow customers to mix and match just those data solutions they need – Salesforce archiving, healthcare imaging, audio/video, messaging (including social media), file systems, legacy application retirement, databases, and SharePoint.

• Q:  What key requirements are addressed by the new enhancements in Archive2Azure – particularly around internal governance, legal and regulatory compliance?

A: Archive2Azure is a full-featured information management/archiving platform which offers data retention/disposition, powerful search, legal case management and eDiscovery functionality, next-gen analytics capability, and legal defensibility.  The information management/archiving directly addresses internal governance, and regulatory compliance and with the included case management provides a full set of eDiscovery capabilities including search/collection, litigation hold, review, and tagging, and export.

• Q: Do you have any parting advice for those planning a move of any type of data to the cloud?

A: The Cloud, especially Microsoft Azure, is offering new capabilities every day such as built-in machine learning/AI that will enable additional automation and decision making, and along with the price difference, will produce cost savings in the 90% range with producing a wildly positive ROI.

To learn more, please visit: www.archive360.com

Bill Tolson, Vice President of Marketing, Archive360

Bill Tolson has more than 25 years of experience with multinational corporations and technology start-ups, including 15-plus years in the archiving, ECM, information governance, regulations compliance and legal eDiscovery markets. Prior to joining Archive360, Bill held leadership positions at Actiance, Recommind, Hewlett Packard, Iron Mountain, Mimosa Systems, and StorageTek.  Bill is a much sought and frequent speaker at legal, regulatory compliance and information governance industry events and has authored numerous articles and blogs. Bill is the author of two eBooks: “The Know IT All’s Guide to eDiscovery” and “The Bartenders Guide to eDiscovery.” He is also the author of the book “Cloud Archiving for Dummies” and co-author of the book “Email Archiving for Dummies.” Bill holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from California State University Dominguez Hills.