Posts Tagged ‘information management’

I’ve been in this industry for most of the last decade now and have seen pretty much all the ways archiving products can and have been deployed in organizations. From small to Fortune 500, they all are slightly different in the way their internal IT is being managed and used.  Archiving products can have a big impact on your infrastructure with requirements and there is one particular piece that I’d like to highlight in this post that many forget.

Time and time again we see news stories and legal case writes ups where it has become obvious employees still have no idea that an email is not a private communication. I find most employees, even corporate legal department types, still consider an email is like a verbal conversation in a parking lot; once its ended, it doesn’t exist anymore (unless it was recorded).

Ok, I know there is a push back from the legal industry in reference to the problem of the cost of discovery. Yes, companies create, use, receive and delete huge amounts of electronic information on a daily basis and it is unreasonable to expect an organization to have enough of a handle on this moving target to be able to place an effective legal hold – quickly, and provide all responsive information in response to an eDiscovery request. But come on… organizations live and die by their information, especially electronic information and if an organization doesn’t have enough of a handle on their data to be able to place a legal hold on select data, then I’m sorry they have other problems.

The newly launched Dell DX Object Storage Platform is an integrated hardware and software solution designed to efficiently access, store and distribute billions of files and other digital content. With the NearPoint solution, the unified content management offering will help organizations reduce the costs and risks of managing unstructured data from Microsoft Exchange.

You’re the GC of a large corporation. It’s Friday afternoon and you’re looking forward to your two week vacation sailing your boat through the San Juan Islands (your first vacation in two years). You pick up a letter from a well known national law firm. Intrigued, you open it.

OH COME ON…What did I do to deserve this!

The letter reads:

The acquisition of Mimosa Systems by Iron Mountain last February was a big piece of the puzzle in Iron Mountains’ digital strategy –  dubbed Digital 2.0.   This acquisition also brought changes for me personally.  In my new role at Iron Mountain I am going to focus on evangelizing the Digital 2.0 vision and product set, a task that I’m both exited about and also don’t underestimate.  For quite a few people, Iron Mountain is the company that moves those boxes in trucks they see driving around. You see them in New York, London and Amsterdam, etc.  For many though, it has largely gone unnoticed that Iron Mountain has been building up a major set of digital offerings for customers, from online backup of PCs and Servers to digital archiving and even technology escrow management.

The last few days I’ve been in the Boston area with my fellow Mimosa Systems blogger Bill Tolson visiting and talking to our new coworkers are Iron Mountain.  I’m very excited about what is coming in the future for us and our customers.   Iron Mountain isn’t just one of the largest trucking company around (3200 trucks) and stores 600 million boxes with an average of 1,200 files each.   On the digital side there are also some impressive offerings and features.

First let me explain what BLOB stands for.  A Binary Large OBject is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single ‘file’ inside a database.  Within SharePoint these are your office documents, images, audio and video files.   While I have no doubts in the overall scalability of SharePoint, the product has some points that all SharePoint administrators and designers need to be aware off.  Microsoft is so kind to publish extensive documents that go over the software boundaries of SharePoint.  The following table lists the recommended guidelines for site objects according to Microsoft: