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. Continue reading Record Keeping Maturity