Information Governance: Why It’s Becoming a Boardroom Imperative

by Darryl K. Taft

It’s no surprise that enterprise data volumes are increasing. IDC reports that data stores of unstructured and structured information created and replicated will grow an average of 60 percent annually for the next five years. Unstructured data and computing backup are driving a nearly 50 percent jump in data storage volume. As data volumes mushroom, applying governance as a hygiene measure in advance of migrating data to the cloud can significantly lower downstream storage costs.

Not all information is the same, so not all information should be managed the same way. At any given time, 1 percent of corporate information is on litigation hold, while 5 percent of corporate information can be classified as a record. At the same time, 25 percent of data has business value while 69 percent has no business, legal or regulatory value. Organizations that take a one-size-fits-all approach to governing data put themselves at a disadvantage. Without a better way to classify and separate data, many organizations are forced to retain everything.

In addition to data volume and variety driving complexity, another corporate reality that’s driving interest in information governance is the acceptance that not all data needs to be stored forever. Most enterprises know that 40 to 70 percent of their data may be eligible for disposition, but few will know exactly which pieces, and even fewer still will have the technology and expertise to handle this in a defensible manner. That’s why about a quarter of corporations cite data disposition as of their biggest information governance challenges.

More and more demands are being placed on enterprise data, which is taxing the organization. Some of these demands are externally driven such as regulatory compliance or e-discovery. These aren’t new demands, but the frequency or importance of them is increasing considerably. In fact, 83 percent of organizations say that compliance will be a top priority for them in the next 12 months, and 82 percent say that they expect an increase in legal matters involving electronic data.

Organizations are now reporting even more negative repercussions associated with poor governance practices. Of surveyed organizations, 31 percent report that poor electronic record-keeping is causing problems with regulators and auditors, while 14 percent report incurring fines or bad publicity. With the increasingly mobile workforce, security breaches are also a growing concern. In 2011, the organizational cost of an individual data breach averaged $5.5 million or $194 per breached record.

Information governance remains an unmet need for most organizations. Less than 10 percent of enterprises admit to high levels of confidence in their approach to the governance of digital information, and 80 percent of companies report a weak or strained linkage between legal obligations for information, records management and IT data management.

In response to the growing need for better enterprise information governance, HP Autonomy offers a simple vision that can help organizations take back control of their data. This vision can help organizations access and understand human and computer-generated information without bias to repository or location, organize and control this data with a common policy framework, and intelligently manage and take action upon this data in accordance with business, legal and compliance, and information management objectives.

HP Autonomy provides information archiving, enterprise content management (ECM), e-discovery and data protection offerings. More details about HP Autonomy’s information governance portfolio of modular solutions is available on the company’s microsite.

HP ControlPoint helps customers access, understand, classify and reduce outdated unstructured legacy data. It helps organizations dispose of redundant, obsolete and trivial information sitting in email repositories, file shares and SharePoint sites. It also migrates the remaining information—that which it wants to retain and manage—into archiving or records management systems so this legacy unstructured data is managed with the same policies and rigor as its live data.

HP Application Information Optimizer (AIO) helps companies remediate structured legacy data. Similar to ControlPoint for legacy unstructured data, AIO relocates inactive structured data from expensive production database systems and legacy applications into archiving or records management systems. Users can dispose of a subset of their information to various active repositories, including HP Consolidated Archive and HP Records Manager.

HP Records Manager is a records management solution that ensures the policy-driven management of business records to improve operational efficiency, staff productivity and achieve regulatory compliance objectives. Recently launched, HP Records Manager 8.0 is optimized for an increasingly mobile workforce that needs access to dispersed data across the enterprise.

Thousands of organizations across the globe are facing a massive data migration challenge with the recent Microsoft Windows XP April 2014 end-of-life announcement. But 63 percent of these organizations have no endpoint data protection or migration plan. HP’s new, enterprise-class offering, Connected 8.8, lets an organization back up, protect and manage data, whether it has a dozen or thousands of PCs and laptops. Connected 8.8 enables fast, reliable and secure migration of data to new PCs, without the need for costly, time-consuming migration tools and IT intervention.