Cloud Solution for Information Management
Information in the Cloud
Organizations are increasingly keeping their information in the cloud. The use of cloud-based drives, boxes and repositories in the average organization is multiplying. For most organizations the last few years have been a balancing act between the greater perceived security of keeping information on premise managed by servers in the organization’s own server room, versus the utility of hiring a commercial service hosted using multi-tenanted software in shared data centers spanning the globe.
Cloud information is available everywhere, on any device, without the complexity of VPN or other access methods. Hardware and software maintenance, as well as backup and recovery capabilities, are all outsourced. Secure encryption and multi-factor authentication ensure that the information is accessed securely from anywhere to all types of devices. In fact, it is so attractive that, in many cases, different departments may have used their own budget to fund adoption of GDrive, Dropbox, or other cloud providers for use in individual collaborative projects, bypassing the strict sanctions of corporate IT.
It is in this capacity, as facilitators of team level collaboration, often between different organizations, that cloud drives demonstrate their utility. Most organizations do not want to invite users from another organization to join their internal corporate network and access documents directly on their servers with full edit privileges. It becomes much easier to set up a separate project box in the cloud into which all collaborators can place shared documents without compromising any party’s organizational infrastructure.
This is how most large and long established organizations are gradually getting into the cloud while smaller organizations and startups are more likely to start in the cloud and simply stay there, even as they scale up into larger businesses. Cloud drives are flexible and scalable, and work at the team level, the departmental level and even the level of a large organization, taking away the need for big IT teams and infrastructure. Cloud hosting is cheap, reliability and security have improved by leaps and bounds, and the workforce is ever more distributed. So why not take advantage of the cloud?
Information Governance in the Cloud
At GlassIG we are often asked whether information in the cloud can be governed with the same rigor as information on-premise. Many organizations have made a considerable investment in developing their corporate information governance policies, and in classifying and managing their information on-premise. Among other necessary functions information governance policies include the ability to set and enforce retention and disposition rules, to ensure compliance with laws and regulations across multiple different jurisdictions, to manage legal cases and in particular legal holds applied to documents, and to keep comprehensive audit information, ensuring evidence-based defensible disposition. The main fear that information professionals have about information stored in the cloud is whether it can be controlled. There is a real danger that these loosely controlled drives will undermine the organization’s corporate information governance strategy.
The good news is that not only is information governance of cloud drives and boxes possible, but with the next generation of information governance solutions, information in the cloud can be governed using the same set of corporate information policies that have already been developed for the organization’s wider information.
A manage-in-place solution like GlassIG can already apply a centralized set of information policies across multiple different systems like SharePoint, shared drives, email, ECM and other information systems. With GlassIG’s cloud connectors this same capability is extensible to all the popular cloud drives and boxes. Even team-level, small, collaborative project cloud boxes can be subject to sound policy based governance.
But the next generation of information governance solutions does not stop there. New solutions, such as GlassIG’s business edition are themselves cloud based, immensely scalable and multi-tenanted. This means that organizational accounts can be created and provisioned, and an information governance program be put in place to govern cloud drives in less than a day. The complex user interfaces of previous generation information governance solutions that were difficult even for information professionals, have been replace by wizards that make it easy to set up and manage large inventories of documents, adding new information policies and creating cataloging rules as required. This adds agility, by making the solution extremely quick and easy to deploy and able to be used by relatively inexperienced information workers across many different information sources.
With an agile governance solution, like GlassIG, information professionals will longer need to spending six months planning a business classification scheme and implementing it before they can enforce information governance across their cloud information. But, at the same time, those organizations that have gone through this process can leverage it by applying the same information policies as they currently use for their traditional information management systems, to their cloud drives as well.
The new model of cloud solution promises to be the first generation that makes Information Governance accessible everywhere.
GlassIG is an independent software vendor which aims to provide market-leading and cost-effective information governance for everyone.