StoredIQ + IBM = Strong Information Lifecycle Governance

As most of you know by now, on December 19th IBM announced its intent to acquire StoredIQ. This acquisition represents an exciting new chapter for StoredIQ and marks a major milestone in our company history, one that recognizes our collective strength and achievements. Our team’s dedication, talent and hard work through the years have been integral to building StoredIQ into an industry leader, and we’re excited about the future for our employees, customers, and partners!

As part of the IBM Information Lifecycle Governance business, StoredIQ will advance IBM’s efforts to help clients derive value from big data and respond more efficiently to litigation and regulations, dispose of information that has outlived its purpose and lower data storage costs. We firmly believe that StoredIQ’s ability to lead and innovate in this space will be significantly stronger as part of the IBM team. Together, IBM and StoredIQ can empower organizations to more efficiently use and govern their unstructured data to increase its value and eliminate unnecessary cost and risk.

In the press release, Deidre Paknad, vice president of Information Lifecycle Governance at IBM commented:

“CIOs and general counsels are overwhelmed by volumes of information that exceed their budgets and their capacity to meet legal requirements. With this acquisition, IBM adds to its unique strengths as a provider able to help CIOs and attorneys rapidly drive out excess information cost and mitigate legal risks while improving information utility for the business.”

Managing Data In Place

One of the benefits StoredIQ brings to the IBM product suite is our ability to manage data where it natively resides. The StoredIQ Platform was designed as a smart, strategic weapon to help corporations discover, analyze, and act on terabytes to petabytes of data, in-place, including data classification, records management, compliance, eDiscovery, and storage optimization. In a recent analyst note, Gary MacFadden with Parity Research discusses the acquisition and wrote:

“One of the key differentiators for StoredIQ has been its philosophy of leaving unstructured data such as documents, emails, images, and other text-based files where they reside rather than moving data to a central repository in order to index and manage it. For large organizations trying to manage petabytes of unstructured digital content contained in hundreds or perhaps even thousands of local and geographically dispersed locations across their enterprise, attempting to consolidate data to a few physical or logical locations is time consuming, expensive and often counterproductive – assuming data aggregation is even a viable option.”

One Platform, Countless Benefits
Built on a powerful, unified platform that dynamically manages data in place, StoredIQ dramatically improve the speed and reliability of information management, lowering eDiscovery costs and compliance risks while meeting the stringent requirements that IT departments demand.  With StoredIQ, you can take Big Data head on to:

• Find information relevant in critical litigation matters
• Know what information is no longer needed, and could be deleted with confidence
• Better respond to regulatory and other inquiries
• Solve big data problems and manage information more efficiently to reduce cost and risk

With StoredIQ, companies gain a comprehensive, unified solution to minimize the cost and risk of managing the ever increasing amount of unstructured data stored across the enterprise in file shares, email, content management systems, SharePoint, laptops, or in the cloud. The capabilities within StoredIQ’s solutions allow organizations to break down litigation preparedness, defensible records deletion, compliance adherence and storage optimization initiatives into targeted, practical projects that deliver improved efficiencies and rapid ROI. Gary concludes in his Parity Research blog post:

“With the addition of StoredIQ, IBM has an additional solution set to provide its clients with both tactical and strategic benefits. Given, the momentum of IBM’s ILG solutions group and the fact that StoredIQ has already been an ILG partner for several years, the integration should be relatively seamless, and StoredIQ should be a much-valued addition to the ILG portfolio.” 

Consistent with IBM strategy, IBM will continue to support and enhance StoredIQ’s clients and technologies while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio. IBM intends to incorporate StoredIQ into its Software Group and its Information Lifecycle Governance business. StoredIQ’s goal with this acquisition is to deliver even more value to our customers going forward, as the StoredIQ software is more deeply integrated with IBM Information Lifecycle Governance solutions. Driven by a firm belief that StoredIQ will enjoy even greater success as part of the IBM Company, we look forward to StoredIQ and IBM’s future together with great enthusiasm! 

For more information about the StoredIQ acquisition, please read the press release and the FAQ document. Or, email us at info@storediq.com.

Dodd-Frank Act Drives Need for Information Governance

In a recent article in Information Management Magazine, Dodd-Frank Act Puts Focus on Information Governance, authors Fred Pulzello, and Sonali Bhavsar suggest that the regulations stemming from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act (Dodd-Frank) should prompt financial organizations to change the way they look at information governance.

What does this mean for financial organizations? Since Dodd-Frank increases the focus on comprehensive recordkeeping as well as establishing robust compliance practices, organizations should examine their current business and data governance practices to make sure that they are in compliance.

As Dodd-Frank is implemented, financial organizations should ask themselves:

• Do we have the systems capabilities in place to identify, track and preserve the required records?
• Is now a good time to perform a holistic data assessment of the information and records our firm currently has stored across all data repositories, content management systems and archives?
• Are we able to implement defensible data deletion policies as prescribed by the new Dodd-Frank requirements?
• Can our current data storage and archiving capabilities withstand the volumes for day-to-day reporting and historical archiving? If not, how can we strategically clean up our data storage?
• Will new technologies be needed to assist, and what does the implementation timetable look like to be in compliance?

Here at StoredIQ, we believe that establishing an actionable information governance plan will help financial organizations comply with these new stringent requirements for record keeping and reporting.  Taking a proactive approach to information management will help financial organizations to reduce risk, preempt litigation and avoid fines by identifying and securing documents as required by law.  Also, it will ensure that valuable business information is safe and accessible to authorized personnel only, according to regulatory compliance requirements and corporate access policies.

To learn more about how StoredIQ’s actionable information governance solutions can help you manage your data to meet Dodd-Frank requirements, contact us today at info@storediq.com or visit www.StoredIQ.com.

New Whitepaper: Actionable Information Governance – Gaining Immediate Value and ROI from Enterprise Data

The growing volume and greater dispersion of data, new methods of collaboration, and the emergence of new internet-based applications pose their own challenges to finding and utilizing information most effectively. Combined with legal, regulatory, and privacy directives, data governance has become an increasing challenge for enterprise organizations. A new white paper from Enterprise Strategy Group addresses how corporations can turn Information Governance from a priority into reality.

Take action. Start governing.

This paper addresses some of the most common use cases for deploying information governance solutions including: eDiscovery, Compliance, Storage Optimization, Data Mapping, and Data Migration—focusing on the immediate ROI and long-term impact. Download the ESG whitepaper and take a step toward actionable information governance:

• Determine what data you have and where it is
• Clean-up trash and de-duplicate data
• Analyze contents and access patterns to determine appropriate policy
• Migrate data to the appropriate storage tier for greater cost efficiency
• Enforce policy for retention and deletion, potentially expiring what’s beyond usefulness or mandated compliance retention

‘Boil-the-ocean’ approaches stall many information management projects. Companies can gain more immediate near-term benefit and ROI by tying actionable information governance to other high-priority large-scale IT initiatives. Tackling an immediate and acute project like eDiscovery or regulatory response, storage optimization, or records management initialization can be an opportunity for ‘go-forward clean-up’ by adding elements of good information governance and better data management.

– Katey Wood, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group

The ESG whitepaper is available from the StoredIQ website at www.info.storediq.com/esg

For information about how StoredIQ can provide actionable information governance solutions for eDiscovery, records management, compliance, and storage optimization, email info@storediq.com.