Digital dusting: spring cleaning for network drives.

• Author: Richardson, Blake E.
• Position: RIM FUNDAMENTALS

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Spring is the traditional time to clear out clutter and deep clean. For organizations, that should include a thorough clean-up of network drives, where they are sure to find a lot of "digital dust"--which might be thought of as invisible electronic matter that shrouds digital files stored on those drives. Digital dust results in electronic clutter, employee frustration, the need to purchase additional storage space, and increased organizational risks.

Obviously, digital dust does not actually exist. However, the effects of improper management of electronic files on network drives are all too real. Over the past decade, the volume of digital content has exploded. According to EMC's 2011 electronic growth study, it is estimated that the world's electronic information is doubling every two years.

The majority of the volume is unstructured information--such as spreadsheets, word processing documents, e-mail, and image formats like PDFs and tiff files--which in many cases finds its way onto company network drives where it collects the figurative digital dust.

Regardless of the size or nature of an organization, its employees receive and create electronic information, and in many cases they store it on network drives. The absence of organizational guidance and controls in this area results in network and hard drives becoming digital graveyards that impede risk management efforts, corporate decision making, e-discovery, and operational efficiency.

The reality is that most organizations--even companies that have implemented enterprise content management or document management applications--still continue to rely heavily on the use of network drives. For many organizations, the use of network drives is a necessity; it represents the only logical choice of repository for the storage of large amounts of unstructured data.

Understanding Network Drives

Since the use of network drives remains prevalent, it is important to understand their characteristics and limitations in order to properly manage their use, maximize their potential, and avoid the digital dust effect.

Folder Structure

Network drives contain folders created to segregate organizational departments or operations located on the same network drive. In most cases, additional subfolders are created under the primary folder to group content of a similar nature. Security settings can be configured to grant or deny access to certain folders or prevent employees from creating new primary or subfolders.

Naming Conventions

If an employee has authorization privileges to create new subfolders, the network drive does not place any restrictions on the naming convention used to label the folder.

Duplication

Network drives have limited ability to prevent the storing of duplicate files. Network drives can detect duplication only if an employee is attempting to...