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.

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!

Upcoming New FINRA Regulations… Are You Ready?

Amendments to broker-dealer books and records requirements under FINRA 4511 and 4512, take effect December 5, 2011. The new rules require member firms to make and preserve certain books and records to show their compliance with securities laws, rules and regulations. These requirements will undoubtedly impact ongoing records management and retention processes for broker-dealers, as well as impact future FINRA audits and legal discovery requests.

Planning for FINRA Compliance
With the effective date only a few months away, broker-dealers will need to be prepared to show updated policies and procedures with supporting systems to be ready for their 2012 FINRA audit. Compliance officers should ask:

• 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 review of the information and records your firm currently has stored across all data repositories, content management systems and archives?
• Are you able to implement defensible data deletion policies as prescribed by the new FINRA requirements?
  Can your current data storage and archiving capabilities withstand the volumes for day-to-day reporting and historical archiving? If not, how can you strategically clean up your data storage?
• Will new technologies be needed to assist, and what does the implementation timetable look like to be in compliance by December?

Meeting FINRA Requirements with StoredIQ
StoredIQ’s Information Governance solution provides broker-dealers with a comprehensive, secure and efficient approach to meeting their FINRA information governance needs. With StoredIQ, companies can manage risk and contain costs by leveraging automated compliance and governance policies.  The result is an efficient and cost-effective answer for today’s highly regulated business world.

By implementing StoredIQ now and planning accordingly, broker-dealers can be in compliance by the December 5th FINRA implementation date and ready for a 2012 FINRA audit examination.

To learn more, download the StoredIQ FINRA Solution Sheet or contact us for more information.