Preservation of Content Under Enterprise Content Management Systems
Long-term preservation of some content is required both for business purposes and compliance with government regulations.
Preservation of historical data enables businesses to generate reports of changing trends in the markets and other performance-affecting factors. Additionally, in the case of businesses executing long-duration contracts or engaged in mortgage lending, each contract and loan could cover transactions over periods counted in decades.
Records have to be kept also for meeting government regulations under different laws. Governments enact rules that stipulate maintenance of records about many matters, in specified formats and for specified minimum periods. The requirements are getting more and more varied and complex.
To meet these requirements, organizations archive data on longer-term storage devices once they cease to be current. Such archiving also speeds up transaction processing on current data repositories.
Long-Term Storage Practices
Enterprise Content Management systems often use data warehouses for storing data relating to several operating periods. Data warehouses are not merely archiving devices; rather they are repositories that have been optimized for querying and analysis, and use the historical data also for the same purposes.
Microfilm storage is one long-term storage solution that has been used in the past also. Document images can be stored on microfilm and read with specialized readers.
Archived data should not be changed or deleted. There are WORM - Write Once Read Many - storage devices that allow random access like hard disks but do not permit changes or deletions of data once written. Optical technologies are typically used for WORM devices.
Another issue related to long-term storage of data is safety and disaster recovery.
Disaster Recovery
The objective of long-term storage fails if the storage device is lost or damaged, say in a natural disaster or other event. Hence preservation should also include practices that minimize such an eventuality and plans for recovering data if a disaster do occur.
Backing up data on a regular basis, checking the recoverability of the backed up data and storing the backup in a different location are key elements in a disaster recovery plan. For example, the microfilm rolls could be stored in a location far from the main offices.
Technologies are available to automatically back up data online, and for transferring backup to removable storage media like tapes and WORM devices. There are also specialists who have facilities and know-how to recover “lost” data from damaged disks.
The key issue is that the danger should be clearly recognized and specific plans are formulated, and implemented on the ground.
Removal of Obsolete Content
While content must be stored so long as it is needed either for business or compliance purposes, it is not a good practice to keep them once they are not needed anymore for these purposes. In fact, organizations have landed in serious trouble because old data have served as “smoking guns” evidencing actions that landed them in trouble with the law.
Hence organizations should have clear policies and practices that identify data that have completed their storage periods and to remove the data from content repositories. Audit trails must also be kept of such removals to prove that these have occurred in accordance with policies and practices and not for purposes of spoiling evidence.
Long-term preservation of data is required both for business and compliance purposes. This requirement is met by archiving non-current data to long-term storage devices like microfilm. Specific plans must be made for archiving, backing up, safe storage and other measures to prevent loss or damage of the stored data. Data that are no longer needed should be removed in a systematic manner.