The anticipated new Companies Act and the release of the King III report represent milestones in the evolution of corporate governance in SA. They also underline the need for sound governance practices and highlight the numerous practical benefits that organisations can realise if they integrate such practices into their operational processes.
One such process is accurate, reliable and secure record keeping, which is expected to be enshrined in new 'e-discovery' laws in the Act. This comes as the overall level of digital information growth spirals to more than 50% year-on-year, driving the need for more storage.
Many organisations have adopted a mandate to save everything 'just in case', resulting in them keeping every record, report and e-mail, including unused data. Stretched IT budgets and reduced staffing levels threaten to undermine this approach and compromise the ability to reliably access critical historical business data when required.
Perhaps it is fortuitous that technology is currently driving new data storage strategies, one of which is to lower the cost of inactive data typically stored in high-end storage arrays, by archiving it to lower cost storage.
Doing so reduces the live data footprint, thereby deferring the need for storage capacity increases and stabilising the overall cost of managing and protecting the key business data.
Backing up
In many cases, archiving has consisted of identifying large sets of unchanging data and simply copying it to backup tapes, which are then removed from the normal tape rotation regime and retained for the required number of years.
This approach presents problems, in that retrieval of archived data from tape is time-consuming and sometimes prone to data loss. This is particularly true as the data ages and the original tape format is replaced by successive generations of tape.
As corporate governance issues have exerted more pressure on business, and the cost of high-capacity serial ATA storage has decreased, online archiving systems have become more widely used. These have ranged from simple bulk storage arrays to sophisticated content repositories, which govern the chain-of-custody of information and can guarantee its integrity under legal challenge.
Small to medium-sized enterprises are first in line to benefit from cloud-based archiving.
John Hope-Bailie is technical director of Demand Data.
Notwithstanding these improvements, embarking on a compliance-driven archiving project has remained a formidable undertaking for most businesses. In addition to the challenges of implementing data classification and an archiving policy, the size of the archive store must be defined.
This is difficult to do well, and often results in a compromise. An undersized repository results in unbudgeted expense down the line, while overestimating the required size means you pay today's price for storage, which you only use tomorrow.
Exhilarating times
The arrival of cloud computing and the related 'storage in the cloud' offerings have added an exciting new dimension to this picture. Many vendors and service providers now offer storage as a service solutions, which are available over the Internet on a subscription basis.
However, the particular requirements related to a compliant enterprise archiving solution require a special approach. Not only must the content be shown to be tamper-proof, but strict aging policies must be in place to ensure data is retained for as long as is needed - but securely deleted immediately thereafter.
Other constraints exist, such as ensuring the archive repository is not open to Web-based attacks, and maintaining service levels when the corporate Internet link is down.
A recent innovation consists of a local archive appliance deployed on the production site, which accepts all the archived data and stores it locally. Immediately after ingesting the archived data, the appliance forwards it to the cloud-based repository over a secure link for permanent offsite storage.
Small to medium-sized enterprises are first in line to benefit from cloud-based archiving, because the normal barrier to entry for an enterprise archiving system no longer applies. One simply pays rental for the capacity archived to date.
Important local infrastructure changes are accelerating the potential for cloud-based archiving, for example wide area network bandwidth has improved, thanks to the Seacom undersea cable.
There is also an increasing realisation in South Africa that the expanding legal framework around corporate governance, compliance, protection of information, etc, will accelerate the need for enterprise archival systems.
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