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.

Although litigious situations like the current Gulf Coast oil spill and Hurricane Ike may be extreme, they illustrate the importance of having an immediate and insightful view into electronically stored data across the enterprise.  They also point to the growing trend of law firms’ increasing their involvement with their client’s in-house technology, in an effort to improve cost savings, increase cost predictability and efficiencies.

For one particular insurance firm, in a case related to Hurricane Ike, outside counsel recommended that the company find a technology solution that could streamline, expedite, and ultimately reduce the costs of litigation.  Given the potential magnitude of the cases it was facing, the agency needed a technology solution that could handle constant usage, execute several concurrent tasks and support multiple users.

Enter StoredIQ’s Intelligent Information Management Platform.  StoredIQ can begin indexing data within just a few hours of being deployed, and offered the agency the high availability and scalability it needed.

The agency used StoredIQ’s one-time, fixed cost solution to eliminate processing and collection expenses by their outside litigation services vendor, saving money, and realizing a positive return on-investment in an exceptionally short amount of time.  StoredIQ also helped the agency avoid duplicate or redundant review, which would have added more costs.  Although StoredIQ discovered, indexed, and managed more terabytes of information, the amount of data that was ultimately sent to outside counsel for formal review was considerably less, and more relevant to the matter.

The old model of lawyers manually reviewing every document is being replaced as outside counsel look more to technology solutions to provide significant time and cost savings. Tell us- have you seen a shift in outside counsel’s focus on in-house technology?