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COMPLIANCE AND BACKUP - NOWHERE TO HIDE

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 2 - March 2006
 

There's no doubt that the issues around compliance are causing massive headaches for many organisations. Every time they turn around, it seems another wave of rules and regulations relating to the retention and retrieval of data is hurtling towards them. 'Doing the day job' is being severely impaired by the need to be constantly looking over their collective shoulders to see where the next wave of legislation is coming from.

 A measure of how badly businesses generally are being affected can be gauged by the suggestion that something like a third of IT directors were unable to advise their CEOs on how long their particular companies were legally required to store their business data. And more than half were unable to confirm whether they even had a policy covering how long they were obliged to keep company emails.

Today, organisations everywhere are having to comply with increasingly tough regulations, while also ensuring that greater access to their corporate information is readily available. The penalties for non-compliance can be swingeing, so it's important that all information your organisation holds digitally is stored securely.

You'll need to ensure that the means to retrieve that data on demand can be met and that the legally required periods of retention are adhered to. At the same time, your systems must be made secure against attackers who might try to disable services, delete files, corrupt data or access information - including downloading information for identity theft or corporate espionage.

There is, of course, a price to pay for meeting all of the new regulatory demands. Businesses not only need to invest in the new technologies that ensure compliance is carried out in the most efficient and cost-effective manner; equally, they may require professional guidance to work out which regulations apply to the business and which kinds of data are subject to which of these regulations.

Compliance and backup go hand in hand - and we tackle both of those challenges in this issue. Certainly, when you consider the commercial value associated with data collected and held, the need for secure storage becomes increasingly paramount. And it is against this compelling backdrop that the investment required to protect these assets becomes far easier to justify.