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.
Continue Reading Information governance – the foundation for information security
Our firm’s elephant icon is a nod to 
Facebook this week announced its new social media application targeted at children, 
We’re addicted to information, but we can’t stand to think about it again once we’ve seen it, saved it, hoarded it. Why? We collect or create it in the moment, but have no thought or plan for its future. Even when it was once and briefly useful, neglected information soon becomes the effluvium of our digital landfills. And, like most landfills, the odor is disagreeable and no one wants to be near it.
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time when businesses actually kept their own information (cue my adult children to roll their eyes). How quaint. We no longer keep most of our information – providers do that for us. We store our data in the cloud, through cloud providers. We outsource business applications to SaaS providers, and even entire systems as PaaS. And we increasingly use service providers to handle key aspects of our business that we used operate internally, resulting in a robust flow of data out of our businesses to such providers, and also the providers generating, receiving, and retaining huge data troves on our behalf.
bage in, garbage out” – we know that already, right? Well … what we know about information quality and what we do are not always in sync. Just for kicks, consider information quality through the lens of the industrial quality movement.
Many years ago, before common sense kicked in, I thought it would be a good idea to rent a storage space for all the extra furniture and other stuff I could not fit in my new house. Knowing it would only be temporary, I stashed everything from upholstered and leather furniture, to boxes of books. Fast forward twelve months. The rental agreement was expiring, and I realized that I would never need nor have room for all that I’d stored, so I decided to have a sale to dispose of it. When I went to the storage space I was horrified to see that everything was covered in a thin film of mold. (This was years before climate-controlled storage was widely available.) I had no choice but to trash it all, which both cost me money and prevented me from converting my goods to profit.
American architect Louis Sullivan, who coined the iconic phrase “form ever follows function,” was flat wrong – at least when it comes to the relationship of what we do and how we capture it with data. The reality is instead that the medium shapes the message, and that record-keeping alters the processes it records. Need a current example? One only has to consider how the President’s staccato bursts of tweets now drive public attention, media focus, and policy debates, both domestically and abroad.