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Do You Have A “Leaver” Data Problem?

Bill Tolson Archiving , , ,

Everyone leaves the company eventually. Better opportunities, reduction in workforce actions, termination, or your manager has the IQ of un-popped popcorn…, no matter the reason, everyone eventually leaves. In the UK, these people are referred to as “leavers.” In the U.S. they’re called departing employees or ex-employees, and depending on the circumstances, more colorful names. However, the way company handles these departing employees can mean the difference between business as usual or major customer satisfaction issues, project delays, higher eDiscovery costs, and higher costs.

When an employee is terminated or informs the company they are leaving, the HR organization usually has a checklist of things to do before the employee departs. This includes (but is not limited to):

  1. Return credit cards
  2. Turn in all expense reports
  3. Turn in laptop
  4. Turn in external hard disks
  5. Turn in cell phone
  6. Returning building and office keys and access cards
  7. Removing access/User ID to all electronic systems

Pretty standard stuff to ensure the employee does not walk off with company equipment or confidential information. However, this process does not address the most valuable company asset…information.

Is Departing Employee Data Valuable?

At its base level, companies employ people to create, process, and utilize information. What happens to the GBs of data the employees create and store over their time at the company? True, much of that information is stored on the employee’s laptop but how long do those laptops sit around before they’re re-imaged and re-tasked? In a blog last month, I touched on this specific problem

“Not long ago I received a call from an obviously panicked ex-coworker from a company that I had left 6 months prior. They were looking for the pricing/ROI calculator that I had developed more than a year prior. A large deal was dependent on them producing a believable ROI by the next morning. I told the ex-coworker that it and all of my content should be on my laptop and even suggested a couple of keywords to search on. Later that day, the same person called back and told me that the company’s standard process for departing employee’s laptops was to re-image the hard disk after 30 days and distribute it to incoming employees – the ROI model I had spent over a man-month developing was lost forever.”

Now consider the numerous other places an employee can store data; file shares, cloud storage accounts (OneDrive, Dropbox), cell phones, SharePoint, One Note, PSTs, etc. Now also consider how you would find a specific file containing a customer presentation in a short period of time…

If not managed as a valuable company asset, much if not all of that expensive employee data is, if not lost, is extremely difficult if not impossible to find when needed.

Chaotic Data Management Makes You a Target

Let’s address another problem associated with ex-employee data… eDiscovery.

You’re a General Counsel at a medium sized company and you receive an eDiscovery request one afternoon asking for all responsive data around a specific vendor contract between Feb 4, 2009 and last month. Several ex-employees are named as targets of the discovery.

This is a common scenario many companies face. The issue is this; when responding to discovery, you must look for potentially responsive data in all possible locations, unless you can prove that data could not exist due to existing processes. The legal bottom line is this: if you don’t know for sure that data doesn’t exist somewhere, then you must search for it, no matter the cost. Opposing Counsel have become very adept at finding the opposing parties weakness, especially around data handling, and exploiting it to force you to send more money so that you will settle early.

Discovery response also carries with it a time constraint. This time required to respond has caused many companies to spend huge amounts of money to bring in high priced discovery consultants to ensure discovery is finished in time.

Both of these issues can be readily addressed with new processes and technology.

Process Change and Technology

Worthless data can be extremely valuable when you can’t find it. Most companies I have worked for were very good about the employee exit process. But so far I have never had an HR (or other) person ask me specifically for all of the locations my data could be residing.

The laptop and cell phone are turned in and quickly re-imaged (losing all data), file shares with work files and PSTs are eventually cleaned up destroying data, and email accounts are closed. Very quickly, all of that employee data (intellectual property and know-how) is lost.

In reality, all it takes to solve this problem is first to develop an exit process that ensures the company knows where all employee data is before they leave, and second, migrate all of that ex-employee data to a central repository for long term management. Many companies are finding that a low cost “cool” cloud archive is the best and lowest cost answer.

Leavers2.jpg

Just because an employee has departed doesn’t mean their intellectual property has to as well. Keep that ex-employee information available for business use, litigation, and regulatory compliance well into the future.

The Industry’s First “Leaver” Archive

Microsoft Azure is that low cost cool data repository.   Archive360’s Archive2Azure provides the management layer for Azure to allow this departing employee data to be migrated into Azure, encrypted, retention/disposition applied, and custom indexing processes enabled to provide centralized ultra-low-cost cool storage so that grey, low touch, ex-employee data can be managed and searched quickly.

“Move to Manage” versus “Manage in Place”

Bill Tolson Uncategorized , , , ,

Traditional approaches to information management are generally speaking no longer suitable to meet today’s information management needs. The legacy “move-to-manage” premise is expensive, fraught with difficulties and contradictory to modern data repositories that (a) are either cloud-based, (b) have built-in governance tools, or (c) contain data that best resides in the native repository.

In reality, traditional records management and ECM systems only manage a small percentage of an organization’s total information. A successful implementation is often considered 5% of the information that exists. What about all the information not deemed a “record”?

Traditional archiving systems tend to capture everything and for the most part cause organizations to keep their archived information for much longer periods of time, or forever. Corporate data volumes and the data landscape have changed dramatically since archiving systems became widely adopted. Some organizations are discovering the high cost of getting their data out while others are experiencing end-user productivity issues, incompatible stuns or shortcuts and a lack of support for the modern interfaces through which users expect to access their information.

The unstructured data problem, along with the emerging reality of the cloud, have brought us to an inflection point; either continue to use decade-old, higher-cost and complex approaches to manage huge quantities of information, or proactively govern this information where it naturally resides  to more effectively identify, organize and advance the best possible outcomes for security, compliance, litigation response and innovation.

Today’s enterprise-ready hardware and storage solutions as well as scalable business productivity applications featuring built-in governance tools are both affordable and easily accessible. For forward-thinking organizations, there is no question that in-place information management is the most viable and cost-effective methodology for information management in the 21st century.

An Acaevo white paper on the subject can be downloaded here

Dark Data Archiving…Say What?

Bill Tolson Archiving, Information Governance , , , , , , , ,

Dark door 2

In a recent blog titled “Bring your dark data out of the shadows”, I described what dark data was and why its important to manage it. To review, the reasons to manage were:

  1. It consumes costly storage space
  2. It consumes IT resources
  3. It masks security risks
  4. And it drives up eDiscovery costs

For the clean-up of dark data (remediation) it has been suggested by many, including myself, that the remediation process should include determining what you really have, determine what can be immediately disposed of (obvious stuff like duplicates and any expired content etc.), categorize the rest, and move the remaining categorized content into information governance systems.

But many “conservative” minded people (like many General Counsel) hesitate at the actual deletion of data, even after they have spent the resources and dollars to identify potentially disposable content. The reasoning usually centers on the fear of destroying information that could be potentially relevant in litigation. A prime example is seen in the Arthur Andersen case where a Partner famously sent an email message to employees working on the Enron account, reminding them to “comply with the firm’s documentation and retention policy”, or in other words – get rid of stuff. Many GCs don’t want to be put in the position of rightfully disposing of information per policy and having to explain later in court why potentially relevant information was disposed of…

For those that don’t want to take the final step of disposing of data, the question becomes “so what do we do with it?” This reminds me of a customer I was dealing with years ago. The GC for this 11,000 person company, a very distinguished looking man, was asked during a meeting that included the company’s senior staff, what the company’s information retention policy was. He quickly responded that he had decided that all information (electronic and hardcopy) from their North American operations would be kept for 34 years. Quickly calculating the company’s storage requirements over 34 years with 11,000 employees, I asked him if he had any idea what his storage requirements would be at the end of 34 years. He replied no and asked what the storage requirements would be. I replied it would be in the petabytes range and asked him if he understood what the cost of storing that amount of data would be and how difficult it would be to find anything in it.

He smiled and replied “I’m retiring in two years, I don’t care”

The moral of that actual example is that if you have decided to keep large amounts of electronic data for long periods of time, you have to consider the cost of storage as well as how you will search it for specific content when you actually have to.

In the example above, the GC was planning on storing it on spinning disk which is costly. Others I have spoken to have decided that most cost effective way to store large amounts of data for long periods of time is to keep backup tapes. Its true that backup tapes are relatively cheap (compared to spinning disk) but are difficult to get anything off of, they have a relatively high failure rate (again compared to spinning disk)  and have to be rewritten every so many years because backup tapes slowly lose their data over time.

A potential solution is moving your dark data to long term hosted archives. These hosted solutions can securely hold your electronically stored information (ESI) at extremely low costs per gigabyte. When needed, you can access your archive remotely and search and move/copy data back to your site.

An important factor to look for (for eDiscovery) is that data moved, stored, indexed and recovered from the hosted archive cannot alter the metadata in anyway. This is especially important when responding to a discovery request.

For those of you considering starting a dark data remediation project, consider long term hosted archives as a staging target for that data your GC just won’t allow to be disposed of.

Can you wipe your twitter ramblings, and should you?

Bill Tolson Information Governance, Social Media , , , , , , ,

In December of 2011, the Library of Congress and Twitter signed an agreement that will eventually make available every public Tweet ever sent as an archive to the Library of Congress.

While writing a blog post last week, I began  to wonder how long all my twitter postings would be available and who could look at them. For the fun of it, I went back through approximately 6 months of my old twitter postings, re-tweets and replies (yes you can do it, it’s relatively easy and you can look at anyone’s).

 I’ve been pretty good about keeping my twitter posts “business-like” and have steered away from personal stuff like “I just checked in to the Ramada Inn on route 11…can’t wait for the evening to begin!”, or “does anyone know how to setup an off-shore bank account?” or “those jerks over at Company ABC are a bunch of losers”.  But many tweeters aren’t so disciplined and have posted stuff that could come back to haunt them later. I could imagine a perspective employer reviewing a candidate’s twitter history or even worse an attorney conducting research for a case using the public twitter archives to create a timeline.

With that in mind, could you delete your twitter postings and should you? Twitter does allow you to delete specific tweets one at a time but as far as I can determine, Twitter does not give you the ability to delete your entire twitter history short of deactivating your account. From the Twitter website:

How To Delete a Tweet

If you’ve posted something that you’d rather take back, you can remove it easily. When you hover over your Tweet while viewing your home or profile page, you’ll see a few options appear below the message.

To delete one of your Twitter updates:

  1. 1.       Log in to Twitter.com
  2. 2.       Visit your Profile page
  3. 3.       Locate the Tweet you want to delete
  4. 4.       Hover your mouse over the message (as shown below), and click the “Delete” option that appears

Voila! Gone forever… almost. Deleted updates sometimes hang out in Twitter search. They will clear with time.

We do not provide a way to bulk delete Tweets. If you’re looking to get a “fresh start” on your Twitter account without losing your username, the best way to do this is to create a temporary account with a temporary username, and then switch the username between your current account and the temporary account. Please see our article on How to Change Your Username for more info. 

On December 30, 2011, CNET published a story titled “How to delete all your tweets” which highlighted a product called TwitWipe. TwitWipe is a free tool that allows you to delete ALL your past tweets in one fell swoop. This may be handy because you can clean out your twitter account and start fresh without changing your username and dumping all your hard won followers.

This is an interesting capability but I think the more important question is why would you use this drastic of a step? The four most obvious reasons one would want to delete all their twitter postings and start fresh would be:

1.       You went through an unfortunate period in your life that you would rather forget

2.       You were regularly conducting criminal activities through your Twitter account

3.       You are considering a run for the presidency

4.       For whatever reason, you don’t want your twitter postings archived and available at the Library of Congress

The ability to delete ESI can be dangerous if done at the wrong time, especially if civil litigation is anticipated. Deleting a single tweet or every tweet you have ever posted can be construed as destruction of evidence if those tweets could have been relevant in litigation. ESI, no matter its format or where it’s stored, is potentially evidence  and should be at least considered when protecting ESI for litigation hold. Attorneys on both sides need to include social media content like twitter postings in their eDiscovery plans and be sure to warn all custodians about deleting/editing  social media content once litigation is anticipated.