Digital Information Governance

I ran across this excellent article by George Crump, the founder of Storage Switzerland and wanted to share it with you -- Making Data an Asset 

In the article George echoes a theme that we at Digital Reef hear again and again when we work with customers and potential customers: enterprises (and other organizations) want to understand and unlock the potential inside their ever-expanding stores of data. They really want a "second-generation" set of discovery tools capable of helping IT reach their goal of making data an asset.

IT understands that the first step in turning data into an asset is some form of discovery. Discovery isn't limited to legal discovery, although the primary reason behind many discovery efforts is to satisfy a sudden need to find everything relevant to a legal proceeding. In general though, the IT professional understands that being able to put users in touch with the data they need saves the organization pain. More importantly, it yields strong benefits for everyone and, in some cases, enhances the revenue potential of the enterprise.

The obvious question is, "Why hasn't this already happened and what is needed to make data an asset?"George points out that companies providing first-generation tools (appliances) have built a business supplying indexing and search products that are appropriate for smaller subsets of data. These companies used an appliance-based approach that had difficulty scaling to handle enterprise-sized data stores. This lack of scalability necessitated moving their offerings toward litigation discovery, where the data was typically divided into smaller pieces manually.

These first-generation tools cannot provide a useful view into enterprise data stores. Further, they require the user to shoulder the administrative burden of managing multiple appliances and handling the results of searches from each of these low-powered devices. In the case of some first-generation solutions, the user is required to load and unload data onto the appliance to derive benefit. What is needed (as George points out) is a single solution that the IT manager can engage with and use to index all of the data across the enterprise.

In addition to being able to handle the volume of data contained within the enterprise from a single system, IT professionals must have a system that preserves unique user views into data while preserving corporate security permissions, such as those carefully imposed via Active Directory and LDAP infrastructure. Any system that supplies access to information must also preserve its security permissions and allow groups of users to collaborate on the data and mark or "tag" it as the needs of their project dictate. This user-view model is not available with current appliance-based review tools or most search products. Furthermore, the system should provide capabilities that automate the discovery and data management processes.

Intelligent mark-up and tagging and user-views of data that has been placed in the "corporate community data store" are important for making data an asset. A second-generation information management solution not only indexes and makes data available, it allows for user-centric views of data and intelligent data mark-up. Policy-based movement of data is another function that second-generation tools provide to the IT professional. This type of function allows the system user to take action on data once it is identified. The system can use classification and analysis algorithms to identify and "group together" data that is similar and that "belong" together. Such second generation systems sound like Nirvana-- in that they remove much manual effort from any task around finding, marking and managing information, or putting data into a form that is meaningful for users (turning it into an asset or "information"). Any IT professional who has used a current generation search tool knows that once the search query is issued, the real work begins. A second-generation device that can mark, move, and manage data is what is required for making data into information (and thus an asset).

The second-generation devices that discover, analyze, and manage data are here now. Digital Reef makes such an extensible software solution that runs on standard server hardware and provides these new capabilities that turn data into information. The first generation appliances have found their place in the limited realm of "load-and-store" limited litigation review applications. The second-generation, with all of its promise, is here now and will unlock the potential within information. It will be exciting in the months and years ahead.