Many companies have an Information Governance (IG) program which is helpful in determining which data to store and which data to delete. The IG program provides an accountability framework which governs which information to keep and which not to keep. Whether your company has an IG program or not we can analyze your legacy data and determine what to retain and what not to retain.
Our services regarding which legacy data to retain and which not to retain are flexible and can be utilized in a range of contexts.
From our other blogs and white papers you might have reached a good understanding of what legacy data is. As a reminder, generally speaking, legacy data is any data stored in an old computer digital storage unit, which is difficult to access. Oftentimes individuals, as well as companies, have a need to retrieve this data. However, the tricky part is figuring out which portions of this legacy data to restore depending on your needs, as you might not need to restore all the stored legacy data if you are looking for just one specific portion from within it. That is where S2|Data’s services can be helpful. Many companies have an Information Governance (IG) program which is helpful in determining which data to store and which data to delete. The IG program provides an accountability framework which governs which information to keep and which not to keep. Whether your company has an IG program or not we can analyze your legacy data and determine what to retain and what not to retain.
We consider this a fair distinction between the two storage mediums: data on disk is forensic analysis, but data on tape is electronic discovery. It is fair to say there is good reason for the distinction. However, should there be a term called “tape forensics” or “backup forensics”?
Our services regarding which legacy data to retain and which not to retain are flexible and can be utilized in a range of contexts, like:
- Company Acquisitions – understanding and curating, prior to incorporating the wanted data into an IG program. The unwanted data is defensibly purged with logs retained.
- Data Consolidation – combining data from a variety of sources – retaining the useful and remediating disposing of the rest.
- Litigation Adverse Clients who have limited and readily identifiable information streams wish to maintain from their Disaster Recovery media while purging the rest.
- Company Separation, where two companies are forming, where data from one company needs to be isolated and maintained, while also being purged from the original company’s systems.
- Inadvertent co-mingling of data streams from two separate companies or divisions, when services are performed by a 3rd party.
- Inadvertent co-mingling of short-term and long-term archival data, where the InfoGov intentions and the backup schedule were out of alignment.
- Country or business closeout, where certain records need to be extracted and maintained, while the rest need to be forensically purged and made non-recoverable.
In many areas you will find that there is an unnecessary amount of data which is taking up storage space and driving up costs.
This is particularly true in terms of backup data which, oftentimes, is duplicated unnecessarily. For certain organizations as much as 98% of all backups are duplicates.
This is basically unwanted data for which there is no real need, and should be removed accordingly.
This is precisely where S2|Data can be helpful.
Here at S2|Data, we are industry veterans and subject matter experts in all-things storage, tape, information, and forensic recovery. Furthermore, we are information governance experts with many senior staff having 20+ years in this area alone. We work with tape, disk, and cloud-based storage and can carefully analyze your stored data to determine which data needs to be retained and which data needs to be deleted depending on your needs.
For instance, data that pertains to litigation should be isolated, protected, and managed, and then deleted following the normal purge cycle, post-litigation obligations. We are also advocates of having a company-wide plan when to deal with the problem of unwanted data. A good way to deal with the problem of unwanted data is to set up a Legacy Data Remediation Plan. Having such a plan will allow you to hone in on legacy data which is vital to you, and delete the portions which have no use to you.
As part of this plan, you should:
- Identify what information to retain and why.
- Determine when all the stored records should expire, so storage space can be freed up accordingly.
- Audit the plan to ensure the desired objectives are being met.