Plasmon has worked with leading organizations throughout the world on implementing long term archiving infrastructures. Over the years, Plasmon has noticed that while every organization takes a slightly different approach to implementing their archives, there is a common set of best practices. However, these best practices are not widely known, and can be elusive to organizations that are just beginning to implement business archiving.
As such, Plasmon has defined a series of best practices to help guide ractioners known as Business Archive Management (BAM). BAM is a set of business processes supported by technology.
Its focus is safeguarding critical information assets, supporting efficient and effective corporate governance, and creating business value. Implementing Business Archive Management involves mastering four core capabilities:
- Business planning identifying archive requirements and agreeing on requirements management
- Archive planning and design defining the policies, processes, and architecture that governs Business Archive Management
- Archive operations and support ingesting, processing, and managing the archive data
- Infrastructure management provisioning, managing, and sustaining archive resources over time, regardless of technology changes and upgrades
The degree to which these four capabilities have been implemented determines how effective and mature Business Archive Management is within your organization. The four capabilities are mastered over time as the archiving process advances, and requirements stabilize. This evolution can be characterized by five stages:
- Chaotic Archive requirements are not managed, and the organization is at the mercy of information requests. There are significant levels of regulatory and corporate governance risk, and primary information storage repositories grow, uncontrolled in size and cost.
- Reactive Basic archive requirements are managed, and the organization has a limited ability to satisfy information requests. Although compliance with simple corporate governance requirements is possible, it is reactive and manual in nature.
- Sustaining The organization implements formal processes to gather archive requirements, and applies a series of complementary controls, policies, and technology capabilities. These actions move the organization to a level of comfort with meeting corporate governance requirements, while improving the overall cost structure and efficiency of its storage environment.
- Proactive Archiving priorities shift from corporate governance and cost savings to creating vaue for the business. Archives become consolidated/ federated and cost structures are near optimal.
- Value add The requirements for archiving and reusing information assets are fully implemented and integrated throughout the organization. Business Archive Management has evolved into a key element of the organization’s competitive advantage.
As companies mature in their business planning, archive planning and design, archive operations and support, and infrastructure management, they experience a comprehensive and unique set of benefits. Initially, business and legal risks significantly decrease as procedures to comply with external regulations and internal policies are effectively implemented. Subsequently, costs decline as organizations make better use of corporate assets via storage optimization. And finally, when companies begin to use archived information to create new opportunities and revenue streams, this value is translated into bottom line results.
Contents
Introduction
Business Archive Management
Business drivers and benefits
- Corporate governance
Efficient use of corporate assets
Business reuse of information
Capabilities to master
- Business planning
Archive planning and design
Archive operations and support
Infrastructure management
A natural progression
- Chaotic archive requirements manage you
Reactive managing chaos
Sustaining gaining control over the archive process
Proactive optimizing archives for business use
Value-add optimizing business objectives
Conclusion
Next steps
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