Guest Column: Managing Growing Data Assets In A Shrinking Economy

By Steve Akers, Digital Reef President and CEO

"Growing" and "assets" are words rarely spoken in the same sentence these days, but when it comes to unstructured data, "growing assets" is exactly the term enterprises are using. The slowdown in the economy has done nothing to stem the proliferation of electronic data, in particular unstructured data in the form of Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and email. Workers, even when their numbers decrease, still manage to create an astounding and expanding amount of unstructured content every hour of every workday. The only downward trend, it appears, is tied to the IT resources left to manage data. And fewer data management resources translate into a bigger data mess.

This is unfortunate because downtimes, like we're seeing currently, beg for better data management. Most obvious are the increase in lawsuits. We are a litigious culture and when we are upset because our money managers have wreaked havoc with our business assets, or our life savings, we invest the money we have left in lawyers. The lawyers require evidence to do their jobs, and the courts demand that they produce this evidence in short order. This kicks off an electronic discovery process that can quickly shed light on how well managed (or mismanaged) an enterprise's unstructured data is. Plus, circumstances like those that created our current economic state instigate an increase in regulations, increasing the attention and resources dedicated to compliance. Regulations don't take a hiatus for a bad economy. Companies must still meet requirements around data management, including knowing what sensitive or regulated data they have and where it is. "I have a reduced staff" doesn't make compliance go away. Similar to "the dog ate my homework", the excuse won't fly. And because resources are scarce, the resources that still exist need to operate more efficiently--whether they are human, financial, or technology resources.

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