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SDA Asia spoke to Low Li Kiang the Solutions Director, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, to understand the challenges faced by the industry with regard to content. Low explains the face-off between regulatory compliance and corporate litigation on the one hand and relentless data growth on the other that is driving fundamental changes in the way content is being managed in organisations today. She also talks about the role of active archive solution in addressing the challenge that content poses. Read on…

SDA: What are the key content-related challenges facing businesses today?

Low Li Kiang (LLK): The face-off between regulatory compliance and corporate litigation on the one hand and relentless data growth on the other is driving fundamental changes in the way content is being managed in organisations today.

Business content can exist in unstructured data such as invoices, contracts, e-mail, instant messages, spreadsheets, and Web pages, as well as structured sources such as applications and databases.

Regardless of its structure, content can have significant legal, compliance, or business relevance to a firm, as IDC analyst Laura DuBois points out.

Regulations may stipulate how long a set of electronic records need to be retained, and the measures that have to be taken to ensure the privacy, security and integrity of those records. The records will also have to be made available for regulatory audits within a stipulated time period.

The ability to access the records in a timely fashion is also vital in cases of corporate litigation, where the records may serve as evidence.

John Webster, an analyst with the Data Mobility Group, describes stored information as a 'double-edged sword'; it represents both business opportunity and legal liability.

The content challenge does not end there. Today, information is a strategic business asset, and there is a need for organisations to find ways to minimise the risk of sensitive information being leaked. According to Dubois, firms are placing an increased focus on the discovery and indexing of unstructured data and the content-based classification of data in order to understand content exposures. This focus will also enable them to apply any information management policies such as retention, access restriction or disposition.

On top of these requirements, firms must also be able to manage their explosive data growth. Storage capacity is growing at a rate of between 50-100 per cent year over year, says IDC. The number of e-mails being archived by a firm is increasing by 70-100 per cent annually.

SDA: How can an active archive solution help to address these challenges?

(LLK): As storage technologies evolve, one of the more promising approaches that has emerged to tackle these challenges is the deployment of an active archive solution that allows organisations to locate, organise, store and dispose of content based on their IT and business policies.

An active archive solution is implemented within a tiered storage infrastructure as a second or archive tier of storage where primary data on primary storage can be moved.

SDA: Why is it important for an active archive solution to be implemented in a tiered storage infrastructure?

(LLK): Making use of tiered storage architectures allows the right content to be placed on the right tier of storage. According to Dubois, this is important because less than 20 per cent of data that a company possesses needs to be stored on high performance enterprise disk storage. By offloading data from expensive primary disks to less expensive storage, the organisation also reduces the time required to back up primary data and is also likely to enjoy improvements in performance.

A pre-requisite for the effective use of tiered storage and active archival of content is an understanding of the value of content to the business, so that the information can be archived appropriately.

This value is intrinsically tied to the business policies of the organisation. According to Dubois, support for business policies is the single most important criterion to consider in an active archive solution. These policies address questions such as:

• Which data sources, based on their content, constitute official electronic records for a firm?
• How long does a record type need to be retained?
• With what categorisation or taxonomy should corporate data be classified?
• How can unauthorise duplication and/or distribution of sensitive corporate information, such as intellectual property or financial data, be prevented?

SDA: What are the key things to consider when evaluating an active archive solution?

(LLK): The actual planning and implementation of the policies is a complex process involving different functions within an organisation.

According to Webster of the Data Mobility Group, Records and Information Management (RIM) professionals who currently implement records management policies in the physical records world play a key role in this process.

RIM professionals can be valuable, timesaving resources for storage professionals when establishing and automating policy, he says. They have a fundamental understanding of organisational records policies, data retention schedules, and a firm appreciation of what electronic records really are.

Building on the collaboration between records management and storage professionals, storage and IT policies can then be established in concert with business policies to ensure that the technical implementation of business policies are in line with the organisation's requirements.

These storage and IT policies will address questions such as:

• Which applications or servers, across multiple locations, have content that needs to be archived according to defined business policies?
• What records can be deleted and when?
• Which IT assets each employee is using?

SDA: How can these policy objectives be met?

(LLK): To meet these policy objectives, the active archive solution that is implemented should have the ability to automate the placement and timely retrieval of information in such a way that legal and regulatory requirements are satisfied while continuing to make the stored information available for business use.

In order to do this, it is essential that the solution is able to support the archival of content from different applications, commercial and homegrown systems, and structured and unstructured data sources into a single active archive architecture.

From a technical perspective, an active archive solution must provide for easy application integration using open, standards-based interfaces.

Having a common active archive solution for multiple content sources results in management, training, and technology savings while enabling centralised search and retrieval and ensuring data security, authentication, and integrity.

Once an active archive solution that supports many different content sources is in place, common services such as index/search, data classification, access controls, retention, preservation, or disposal, can then be performed centrally across multiple content types based upon the defined business policies.

Another consideration in an active archive solution is that it has to be able to preserve the authenticity and integrity of the electronic records. Some regulations require that electronic records be stored in a way that ensures they cannot be changed, modified, or deleted during the lifetime of the record. Examples include The US’ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (also known as HIPAA) and the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX).

In line with these requirements, an active archive solution must be able to preserve the longevity of the data. For example, some healthcare institutions must retain records for close to 50 years. During this period, it is highly likely that the underlying technology storing the electronic records will become obsolete. Because the content is likely to outlive the media on which it is stored, an active archive solution must be able to easily and transparently migrate the content to the technology of the day. It must also be self-managing, relieving storage administrators from routine tasks such as zoning, partitioning, and provisioning of storage.

A well-implemented active archive solution, which takes into consideration all these factors, will help organisations ensure content integrity, accessibility and reliability, and is key in addressing the regulatory, legal and competitive requirements of today’s business environment.

SDA: What are the business benefits to be gained from adopting active archiving

(LLK): The business benefits are as follows:

1. Preserve and Retain Fixed Content

• Allows for active archiving of all types of content, such as e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, images, database records, etc.
• Reduces content retrieval time-when answering mandates of legal discovery, regulatory audit, business information/knowledge search, and such-since archived content is stored in an online disk
• Ensures the authenticity of content at the time it is archived by creating a unique digital signature and matching it when the content is retrieved in the future
• Adheres strictly to retention policies to prevent deletion prior to the end of retention date as set by corporate policy and/or government regulations

2. Optimise Performance and Availability

• Handles multiple file-transfer sessions in parallel to achieve high throughput to nearline and tape-based solutions
• Keeps data safe and ensures high reliability through file authentication, retention, protection, and logging
• Simplifies management and administration through a self-managing cluster design that allows storage nodes to be added or removed without configuration
• Ensures high availability with cluster architecture and RAID-5 protection
• Distributes data evenly across nodes for load balancing and optimised performance

3. Meet Governance and Compliance Requirements

• Sets and adheres to retention periods: "write once, read many" (WORM)
• Provides authenticated content preservation with choice of digital signature or hash algorithm (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512)
• Achieves content protection by storing multiple copies or through RAID storage