Is your company's archive really archival? What to do if you fear it isn't.If you're managing records or data for any substantial enterprise, some seemingly ordinary or unseen activity occurring today will have future consequences--probably more significant that anyone would guess. Note that we're not hedging that statement--it will happen. Here's the catch: you won't know what it is, much less its importance, until (for example) a customer complains or a subpoena subpoena (səpē`nə) [Lat.,=under penalty], in law, an order to a witness to appear before a court. A subpoena ad testificandum [Lat. arrives. Suddenly you'll be looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. sensitive e-mail exchanges, or a discrete e-commerce transaction, or a spreadsheet once used in an SEC filing--and you have to produce it timely or face dire consequences. Your organization's survival could be on the line. How sure are you that your organization can produce a trustworthy record? According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. some analyst reports, confidence levels among IT professionals nationally are 50% or less. What is "Archival"? The term "archival" implies organization and longevity, but that could apply to cave drawings and pyramids as well as corporate files. The world of commerce imposes other requirements as well. A mission-critical archive should be: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] * Defined by a thoughtful record retention policy * Comprehensive: Retaining all important information as long required * Exclusive: Purged routinely of duplicate, outdated, or unnecessary records * Searchable: Indexed for easy location of records on demand * Retrievable: Capable of delivering any record in whatever format a circumstance requires, as promptly as needed as needed prn. See prn order. * Technology transcendent: To survive evolution of information technologies * Cost effective: Considering cost of storage real estate and the technologies involved, the ideal archive provides all of these attributes as the lowest possible cost over the lifecycle of its contents Computer networking
Computer networking is the engineering discipline concerned with communication between computer systems or devices. and advances in digital storage technology would seem to have created archival bliss for modern enterprises, but these simple principles are challenging to practice. New Risks of Information Management A record may be unavailable for perfectly innocent reasons; perhaps it was just lost, or accidentally deleted, or corrupted due to missing metadata. This "digital shredding shred n. 1. A long irregular strip that is cut or torn off. 2. A small amount; a particle: not a shred of evidence. tr.v. " can still become what lawyers call negligent or willful Intentional; not accidental; voluntary; designed. There is no precise definition of the term willful because its meaning largely depends on the context in which it appears. spoliation of evidence Lawyers and courts use the term spoliation to refer to the withholding, hiding, or destruction of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding and is a criminal act in the United States under Federal and most State law. . New accountability rules, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act See SOX. , make companies and management liable to criminal charges and civil actions for flawed record management systems, deliberate or not. Fortunately, organizations can protect themselves, achieve cost savings, and add operational efficiencies by applying the right technologies to the information lifecycle. There are automated background processes that are easy to operate and include audit trails. Begin With the End in Mind Archiving strategy should be driven by what drives the organization. Examples of mission-critical records needs include: * Provide proof of contract to properly collect and disburse dis·burse tr.v. dis·bursed, dis·burs·ing, dis·burs·es To pay out, as from a fund; expend. See Synonyms at spend. [Obsolete French desbourser, from Old French desborser funds * Buy and sell goods and services In economics, economic output is divided into physical goods and intangible services. Consumption of goods and services is assumed to produce utility (unless the "good" is a "bad"). It is often used when referring to a Goods and Services Tax. * Back up ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) An integrated information system that serves all departments within an enterprise. Evolving out of the manufacturing industry, ERP implies the use of packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) An integrated information system that is used to plan, schedule and control the presales and postsales activities in an organization. systems * Provide mandated, admissible (algorithm) admissible - A description of a search algorithm that is guaranteed to find a minimal solution path before any other solution paths, if a solution exists. An example of an admissible search algorithm is A* search. documentation to meet regulatory filings * Protect a company's shareholders and management from litigation An action brought in court to enforce a particular right. The act or process of bringing a lawsuit in and of itself; a judicial contest; any dispute. When a person begins a civil lawsuit, the person enters into a process called litigation. and criminal prosecution Analyze Your Options, Keep Them Open. With clear goals, records can be prioritized for archiving based on the activities they support. Some should be discarded in months, some in 5 to 7 years, and others, such as corporate minutes and insurance policy contracts, need to be kept into perpetuity perpetuity n. forever. (See: in perpetuity, rule against perpetuities) PERPETUITY, estates. Any limitation tending to take the subject of it out of commerce for a longer period than a life or lives in being, and twenty-one years beyond; and in case of a . These records are likely to reside across multiple business processes in multiple formats. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Here's a key: Taking a "snapshot" of records at the moment of creation or transaction provides indelible evidence, come what may, and affords retention or purging of records according to the organization's retention policies. Match Storage Choices to Your Records' Lifecycles At the end of your discovery process, you'll have records in "containers" with a variety of lifecycles to serve a variety of needs. Backup, disaster recovery, vaulting vaulting Gymnastics exercise in which the athlete leaps over a form that was originally intended to mimic a horse. At one time, the pommel horse was used in the vaulting exercise, with the pommels (handles) removed. , and research may be distributed in your organization, but from the records management perspective, these processes are all interconnected. That argues strongly for a multi-dimensional approach to archiving that covers all the bases. A multi-targeted storage approach makes it much easier to align archiving with the daily needs of the enterprise and with the needs for disaster protection. The different technologies available each have particular strengths and weaknesses. You can set up your system to parse classes of records out to various storage targets based on how each serves the needs of the enterprise and records lifecycle. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Integrate Platforms in a Reference Archive The best approach in many cases (what we call a reference archive) marries state-of-the-art information technology with the reliable, admissible, mature technology of microfilm A continuous film strip that holds several thousand miniaturized document pages. See micrographics.  Microfilm and Microfiche . Today's imaging technology creates a much cleaner microfilm record than what we all used to peer at through the readers at our local libraries in elementary school--in fact, often better than the original, and with full-color capability. Affordable technology 'bridges' move records easily, even at the moment of transaction, between digital, hard copy, or microfilm as needed, easily and with indexing to support retention policies and retrievability. Rather than relying on a one-technology- fits-all solution, an enterprise can integrate the strengths of different technologies to suit the attributes and uses of a given record. The list of expanded storage Additional memory in IBM mainframes that is not normally addressable by applications. Introduced for the 3090 series, the data are usually transferred in 4K pages from expanded storage to central storage (main memory). See hiperspace. options available includes servers, hard copy vaulting, off-line tape and CD libraries, and reference archive equipment that captures and renders analog snapshots of selected enterprise activities as they happen. Any company can limit its exposure by weaving storage options together to create a multi-dimensional archive that meets its unique needs. A reference archive will provide access to trustworthy records for processing, short-term validation, long-term proof and deep disaster recovery. Better still, this strategy can also lower the firm's total cost of ownership for storage and handling capabilities. Taming the Tonnage TONNAGE, mar. law. The capacity of a ship or vessel. 2. The act of congress of March 2, 1799, s. 64, 1 Story's L. U. S. 630, directs that to ascertain the tonnage of any ship or vessel, the surveyor, &c. at Travelers Connecticut-based Travelers Insurance is a model of document management efficiency. The company issues approximately 850,000 commercial policies per year and now has over 40 million policies on fiche Same as microfiche. , film and CD, along with stored instructional and policy manuals. Policies need to be retained and accessible for 50 years or more. Travelers employs a highly automated process for both input and retrieval. Incoming policies don't need to be presorted; they are simply scanned as mixed batches on a Kodak high volume scanner, and then placed into orderly folders, post-process, for filming using a Kodak Document Archive Writer. "The film images are outstanding, quality-wise, from the Document Archive Writer," says Kathy Rutledge, manager of Records Retention. "The scanner does a great job, too, so there are virtually no skewed skewed curve of a usually unimodal distribution with one tail drawn out more than the other and the median will lie above or below the mean. skewed Epidemiology adjective Referring to an asymmetrical distribution of a population or of data images, hands, or overlaps. If there is an issue, it can be spotted and taken care of immediately. We get more perfect rolls, it's faster, and more documents fit on a roll." The retrieval side of Travelers operation, headed by Julie Senerth, manager of Commercial Lines Document Management, uses Kodak microimage scanners to locate, and fax or e-mail documents directly from the film, greatly streamlining the process. "Those features are great time savers and earn us lots of compliments from the reps in the field," she notes. For the 5,500 policy requests per month Travelers receives from the field, the Kodak equipment outputs document images directly to standard laser printers. Cross-Platform Indexing Solutions Boost Efficiency The Suffolk County Suffolk County may refer to:
"Built-in image processing image processing Set of computational techniques for analyzing, enhancing, compressing, and reconstructing images. Its main components are importing, in which an image is captured through scanning or digital photography; analysis and manipulation of the image, accomplished capabilities mean correct images and the elimination of rescanned documents," said Peter Schussler, Suffolk County IT director. "The system keeps pace with demand and is easily scalable to meet future growth. Our backlog of paper documents waiting to be imaged has been virtually eliminated and we have been able to reassign employees to other critical functions within the county." Automatic Archiving That Integrates With Your Other Storage Systems These systems manage capture and retrieval behind the scenes. A reference archive accepts digital files, organized by your selected records management attributes--such as class, date, or destruction schedule. Copies are accessible digitally through host applications. The reference archive sets down a trustworthy, non-volatile store of records that can be drawn from virtually any line of business application and is beyond malicious or accidental digital shredding. Electronic assets can remain online for near-term processing, allowed to age in place and be purged with the confidence that the records remain available in the reference archive for short- and long-term validation. Incorporating a reference archive into a records management strategy provides returns directly to the bottom line. Rather than spending $800 to $5,000 a year per gigabyte to store data on a server, the reference archive should afford a substantially lower total cost of ownership. Finally, implementing a reference archive eliminates the headaches of supporting legacy systems beyond their economically useful life, and an organization can adopt new technologies without the burden of data migration or media refreshes for seldom-accessed but required archival data. www.kodak.com Andy Lawrence is worldwide marketing manager for Document Products and Services. Commercial Imaging Division, at Eastman Kodak (Rochester, NY) |
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