In Steve Bailey’s blog, http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/, the author has written about his recent attendance at the European Conference on Archiving (ECA) in Geneva in April, 2010. Steve has observed that in previous years at the conference most discussions were about the technical complexities of digital archival, the many different approaches to digital archival practices and the ensuing problems associated with false assumptions.

In earlier years Information Records managers were also concerned with the durability and shelf life of digital media as compared to earlier technologies and referenced against the famous Domesday Book and our electronic counterparts of today.

This year, at the ECA, it was reported to have a different atmosphere with more conversations and subjects revolving around case studies further suggesting that the challenges of archiving digital content material have been met and are almost of a “routine” nature these days. So the question of “can” or “how” do we preserve data without future data loss – and this is of concern to email administrator and IT departments – is now a question of the past.

For email administrators and records managers the concerns of how do we protect our company from not losing data has been replaced with the concern of how do we manage this huge amount of data where no data or emails are in danger of being lost anymore. Indeed, new technologies such as cloud computing are allowing administrators to ask for new tools to help them manage this soon to become massive amount of data that is coming at them like a tidal wave of information that is growing exponentially.

In his blog post on this subject, Steve Bailey, raises the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room question of what about the growing impact of the cloud and of how safe is it to have your company’s data, emails, company confidential information, etc. stored in the archives of the cloud. More so, he raises the question of how long before they lose that control and what happens then.

I agree with him that these are issues that records managers must plan for when they and their IT departments are working out the details during the initial planning stages of the who and how of data storage as it relates to a company’s data whether it be for emails, their attachments or much larger documents.

Each year, during budgetary planning sessions and long term IT strategy meetings, administrators, company legal departments and records managers must meet and discuss the subject of will their company’s IT department continue to administer all or some of their operations of which email administration and retention is a big part of. During these discussions many options are proposed. And the proposal which is most often discussed these days is that of email hosting being performed off-site.

There are several companies out there who offer fully hosted email services including email security within a cloud environment. This shift to external email hosting can help reduce the costs of many IT departments who are part of any company whose core business is other than that of information systems management.
 
As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts the proposal of tapping into the cloud computing environment has usually been met with resistance because not only is cloud computing a change in the business processes of a company – such as email security and records management – but also because trusting your own internal IT departments email administration and data to another company that is offering a cloud solution is asking for a big commitment and level of trust by any organization.

But as mentioned earlier the tidal wave of information is not only coming at us but is upon us – upon email administrators as well as IT managers.

One approach that administrators can consider is that of a hybrid solution where the best of on-site administration and practices are combined with the best of hosted records or email management in the cloud. In terms of reporting and tracking features necessary for compliance reasons most inbound email scanning can be performed in the cloud as well as within a hybrid approach without loss in performance.

Large companies can benefit from the capacity and scalability that cloud computing has to offer while at the same time they can keep their data loss prevention technologies and related business processes in-house.