Managing Electronic Records: Methods, Best Practices, and Technologies

CHAPTER 18

Storage and Hardware Considerations

When considering the fact that information is estimated to be doubling approximately every two years, and that more data has been generated in the past three years than in all of time, the massive amounts of data that organizations are struggling to manage becomes readily apparent. It's a crushing amount, and it increases in volume daily.

The Onslaught of “Big Data”

In today's environment, it is not feasible for humans to review each and every document or record to determine its final disposition; there is simply too much information being generated for this approach to be practical and cost–effective. Some fundamental changes are needed in the records management industry to allow for information governance (IG) rules to be set, retention schedules developed and agreed upon, and then to allow for the systematic auto–classification of documents and records according to document type.

Larger organizations that are being choked with this onslaught of “big data” are beginning to realize that they do not need to keep probably 50 to 80 percent of the information that they are keeping, it is simply “data debris,” so massive savings in hardware, labor, and maintenance costs can be had by gaining control over the information and distilling it down to only what is needed, and then managing it according to a policy–based retention schedule. Also, the data itself is all discoverable, and represents an avoidable legal risk.

It really all boils ...