Sponsored by Acaveo, GWAVA, IBM, and Proofpoint
Published February 2015
Executive summary
According to various industry articles and vendor marketing materials, most organizations are struggling with the problem of too much electronic data—how much of it there is, what it contains, who has access to it, where it is currently stored, and how long it should be kept. In other words, how to govern it more effectively. To tell you the truth, they’re right. The sheer volume of information, combined with the speed of its accumulation (velocity) and the lack of effective management is at the root of the problem. This surplus of electronically stored information (ESI) is, in reality, driving up the cost of storage, raising the cost and risk of eDiscovery and regulatory compliance, negatively impacting employee productivity, and raising the prospect of intellectual property theft and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leakage.
To get a better handle on this ESI problem, organizations should take a long, hard look at the main problem: a lack of any effective enterprise-wide information governance. After recognizing the main problem, organizations can then take action, such as creating an enterprise-wide information strategy, developing use policies and an information retention schedule, and adopting information management automation. These will enable the organization to systematically find, categorize, manage and defensibly dispose of ESI in a timely, cost-effective manner.
The most effective measure of information governance (IG) success is to determine if the IG program has the potential to produce the required return on investment (ROI) to make the investment profitable.