The content and storage balancing act

When I was at AIIM a couple of weeks ago I participated in a round-table discussion [1] sponsored by Xerox on the paperless office (as I wrote about in "The paperless office remains elusive [2]"). As I sat there that day, it occurred to me that digitizing data creates a whole new set of new problems.

While you don't have boxes of paper sitting in warehouses anymore, you still have to store it electronically and track it, archive it and find it. In fact, search is a whole other kettle of fish to fry, which perhaps I will attack in a future column. For today, I want to look at the relationship between content and storage.

Content breeds content

It's no coincidence that EMC [3] bought Documentum, a content management vendor back in 2003. EMC CEO Joe Tucci understood the relationship between content and storage. If you manage content, you need to store it and Documentum would provide a link to the company's bread and butter storage business.

But the more content you have, the bigger your storage problem. At some point you have to gain control of this content. This is especially true where eDiscovery issues come into play. You can't plead to a judge that you have too much content. That's not going to fly in today's court system, especially after the 2006 changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) (which I wrote about in Second anniversary of federal rules of evidence [4]). As I wrote, Craig Carpenter from Recommind [5] said this had a profound change on the way companies dealt with litigation issues:

"Carpenter explained that the change in focus on electronic records was huge because the court explicitly recognized electronic evidence in this fashion, there were still many people who didn't understand its impact on litigation. One of the big side effects of this ruling was that it forced legal departments to work more closely with IT to use technology to sort through the mountains of electronic evidence."

Managing content for life

This all means that you are responsible for knowing where your content is, right down to the email, instant message and even a Tweet on Twitter-level. You have to manage and secure it and know what's coming in and leaving your firewall. It has to be a top-down approach like so many projects we talk about in this space, with a C-level position devoted to content security and life cycle management.

It's also no coincidence that EMC came out with a new set of eDiscovery tools last week--branded as SourceOne [6]--or that Open Text was called out in this Barron's article [7] for their risk and compliance abilities. Content management vendors understand this connection. It all comes down to controlling content, whatever and wherever it may be, at every level. If you don't, you're putting your company at risk, making it more difficult to manage and control, and you're building a new problem around storage. - Ron [8]