Unified archiving: friend or foe of 'the principles'?

• Author: Murchison, R. Scott

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A lot has been written and said about the Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles[R] (the Principles) in recent years, but not much has been said about emerging technologies' impact on or influence in helping organizations comply with them. Very little is offered by analysts or the vendor community about how current or emerging technologies help organizations comply with laws, regulations, or policies, in general.

It is useful, then, to examine one of those technologies--unified archiving--to determine its value to an organization's efforts to comply with the Principles, which, in turn, helps ensure broad compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

Problems Unified Archiving Helps Solve

Every information governance professional understands that enterprise content management (ECM) technologies are useful in providing a mechanism to bring compliance to electronic content. But, they may not have conquered the quandary of how to deal with:

* Duplicate distribution of e-mails with the same attached documents being retained in the e-mail archive

* Duplicate versions of a contract being saved in multiple locations within the ECM system and on network shared drives because departments that need access don't want to share

* Uncontrolled copies on local hard drives and various portable data storage devices

IT departments are increasingly responding to these problems with single-instancing technology, also known as data de-duplication. As this capability moves from the shadows of IT to those departments that have governance and compliance responsibilities for managing information, the emerging term for this is unified archiving.

What Unified Archiving Is

When it comes to electronic content, the ungoverned Wild West is still in play as multiple versions of documents are passed among collaboraters using the e-mail system. These multiple copies are saved onto shared drives and in ECM systems, edits are made, and multiple versions are then passed back through e-mail servers.

If an organization is using e-mail archiving, it becomes almost impossible to manage, let alone dispose of, information that proliferates in this ad hoc way because e-mail archiving archives all e-mails--every version with every attachment.

This "archiving of everything" is the beginning of electronic warehouses of data where vital business information can become buried among vast amounts of duplicate data. This, in turn, reduces network storage capacity, diminishing the value of the system and increasing the cost and support needed to maintain it. It transfers the problem, it does not solve it.

Because IT departments are concerned about storage costs and impact on the technology infrastructure, many are deploying unified archiving. De-duplicating, or removing duplicate copies of information on a storage system, is an essential component of unified archiving. It is a way to compress and scan large blocks or groups of data...