The trouble with media management
There are a lot of files nowadays in a standard archive. Thanks to big data, there are a lot more documents pouring down the pipeline every minute, even when IT workers are out of the office and backup tapes are already chugging away in their routine backup windows.
The struggle here has to do more with creating adequate management tactics of existing data storage than simply coming up with a structure big enough to house all of it. Considering that a large chunk of an active data center is usually dead space that is not being utilized properly, the footprint of a server room can probably stand to be reduced somewhat, but that’s still not going to solve the information management issue.
Figuring out the logisticsCreating large enough backup tape storage facilities is now highly tenable. What is not is coming up with a method to the madness that is inherent to petabytes of information. This volume of data will need some sort of advanced tracking software, cataloguing efforts and developing a search tool that allows companies to find pertinent records as effortlessly as possible.
Failing to create such a resource is a stumbling block for a large portion of companies, CIO Online wrote. Legal authorities on media management and audit compliance agree that being able to garner meaningful use and instituting an efficient data retrieval method can be incredibly useful to any business, but most of them struggle to obtain such usability.
“Without an archive, you are reviewing duplicates [of data],” said Allison Walton of Symantec. “[Data] is hard to find because you are sorting through terabytes and terabytes of information, it’s costing a lot of money and it’s trash.”
Compliance disregard
Much of the problem here could also be linked to the fact that not all companies take file tracking and storage maintenance seriously. As Dark Reading wrote, more than three-fourths of all organizations are using noncompliant file transfer and security practices, since about half of all employees feel compliance guidelines shouldn’t apply to them or don’t know how to follow these rules.
“What [companies] fail to consider is the price they’ll pay goes far beyond compliance fines,” Bob Janacek told the source. “In addition to investigation, legal fees and costs associated with new prevention efforts, there’s always severe backlash from a tarnished reputation.”