Symantec, a leading provider of services and software to help consumers and businesses secure and manage their information, released the results of a recent survey they conducted.  The survey, titled "Information Management Health Check," was conducted by Applied Research in June 2010.  The survey included 1,680 enterprises in 26 countries.

One of the first findings was that while most organizations believe that a proper information retention strategy will allow them to delete unnecessary information, only 46% actually have a plan for doing so.  Organizations realize that a retention strategy will help them in terms of reducing costs, litigation risk and expensive and inefficient ediscovery processes.  But many are seeing good information management strategies as a luxury instead of a critical part of their business.  Other benefits of deleting information that you are no longer required to keep from a legal or business standpoint is that employees and others searching for information don't have to suffer from information overload, reviewing pages of search results where the information is out-of-date or are no longer relevant.

Another key finding was that organizations are over-retaining information.  One statistic that caught my attention in this area was that three-fourths of the respondents indicate backups have infinite retention or are on legal hold.  We advise clients that a policy should be in place that indicates backups (whether disk or tape) are for disaster recovery purposes only.  They should not be used for convenience restores or to recover from user mistakes.  If you use backup tapes in this manner, they could be ruled as being accessible and subject to production in litigation.  It is a defensible position to use them only for disaster recovery and to have short retention periods for them.  If you think about recovering from a disaster (think smoke and rubble), how old do you really want the information to be that you are restoring from.  Anything longer than a few days would make it difficult for the business to recreate the transactions or other information. 

The survey found that 70% of the respondents are using their backup systems to perform legal holds.  By using the backup tapes for the legal hold process, they are holding far more information than necessary.  The organization is exposed for all of the other information that is being held on the tape for litigation subsequent to the original legal hold.  This is totally unnecessary exposure for the organization.

The final point from the survey was that these bad (or absent) information management practices result in serious consequences.  One consequence we have talked with clients about is the totally unnecessary expense of reviewing data for litigation or audits that shouldn't be in your environment at all.  Some surveys indicate that it is 1500 times more expensive to review data than to store it.  Other consequences of over retaining information is the difficulty in backing up all of the information within a window that is acceptable to the business and the long recovery times in the event of a disaster where the business has to "get by" until the restoration of data is complete.

The full survey is available from this press release.  If you are unsure of where to start in getting better control of your information retention requirements and practices, talk to us about how Access Sciences has helped others in the area of Information Management.