How time flies. Seventeen years ago, I went to work for a small, visionary company based in Seattle—Computer Forensics, Inc. Indeed, the founder was so early in the e-discovery and forensics industry that our URL was forensics.com. Laptop drives typically had 8 GB of storage, and servers were more often than not simply a bigger box that sat in a closet.
Lots has changed since then. New technologies, expanded data sources and media types, and more raw data have flooded consumer and business marketplaces alike. We’ve all seen the scary statistics on increasing information volumes and the security risks that follow. Unfortunately, our controls for the creation, management, retention, and disposition of those data have not kept pace. Yet how we manage our data on a day-to-day basis goes also to the heart of how we protect our data and ensure that our information assets are secure from theft or compromise.
During my years at CFI and since, I’ve found myself pondering “what if?” questions. What if we only had to protect 20% of our information? What if clients could take dollars earmarked for e-discovery and increased storage and spend them instead on better systems and operational improvements? What if a client faced with the reality of a data breach didn’t have to wonder how many unnecessary skeletons were now visible? The promise of information governance is that we can answer these questions affirmatively. This is good news, and more importantly, news you can use.
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In a