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.

Using Data Mapping and Assessment to Minimize eDiscovery Cost and Risk

Last week Dennis Kiker contributed an interesting article to Law Technology News entitled How To Manage ESI To Rein In Runaway Costs. At the heart of the problem is that we’re a country of corporate data hoarders. We keep data past its expiration; we don’t have a good system in place for categorizing and managing it, and are overwhelmed when a legal request necessitates identifying and collecting data relevant to a case. Dennis states:

Despite the high cost of its painstaking preservation and storage, much of this data will never be relevant to any legal case. Indeed, according to a 2009 survey by Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, 60 to 80 percent of the information retained by corporations in America has no value from a business or legal perspective.

Legal departments have historically focused on the ‘right side’ of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) – the analysis and review stages. However, if the quality of collected data in the review platform is unnecessary, insufficient, spoiled, or irrelevant; this significantly increases an organization’s legal cost and risk.

Kiker goes on to say… the best approach for many companies is to get serious about cleaning up their information environments. By “taking out the trash” in a major way, companies stand to make big cuts in their annual data-storage bills, which can also run into the six figures. This also enables them to more quickly and more accurately identify potentially relevant information for the attorneys to sift through during a review process, potentially lowering their legal bills.

Legal teams are increasingly realizing the business value and ROI from strengthening their company’s ‘left-side’ EDRM capabilities and understand that sound information governance practices result in highly targeted and effective eDiscovery.

The article points out that shrinking the overall stack of data is a good start to minimizing eDiscovery costs, but companies also need to find all the relevant information contained in their data. He says:

Data mapping offers a way to solve this problem. The basic idea is to create a master index that spells out exactly where content is stored. Surprisingly, many companies have never taken this critical information management step.

In fact, Barry Murphy was reflecting on the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Conference and commented in his blog: Get specific. Know where data lives and do the data maps.  It’s impossible to preserve data if you don’t know where it is.

At StoredIQ we couldn’t agree more. To prove it, during the month of August, StoredIQ is extending a promotional offer for our data assessment and mapping service. The first 10 qualified companies will pay only $10,000, a savings of $5,000 off list price.

StoredIQ Data Assessment Services provide unprecedented visibility into the unstructured data across the enterprise. This invaluable service quickly gives organizations critical understanding of their business content to make more informed decisions about the management, retention, and disposition of their data.

To learn more about this offer and to take the first step toward managing your escalating ESI-related costs and risk – contact us today!