What Does Information Governance Really Mean for SharePoint?
Collaboration is essential to modern day businesses. Collaboration tools like SharePoint have been proven to improve efficiency among individuals and teams, accelerating business processes and decision-making across the enterprise. SharePoint has been widely adopted. It is considered one of the most rapidly growing enterprise technologies today by allowing companies to create sites to share information, manage documents and publish reports. A critical side-effect, however, is the generation of vast quantities of content, records and information. While companies and employees certainly benefit from the ease of content creation and sharing, the amount of information generated creates a tricky situation for companies—they must comply with the vast amount of regulations and apply their approved corporate retention schedule to all information assets, and content within SharePoint is no exception.
Information governance enforces desirable behavior in the creation, use, archiving and deletion of all corporate information. SharePoint delivers basic records management functionality, however industry analysts agree that the current offering does not address all enterprise records management and information governance requirements including: the ability to provide support for multiple jurisdictions; integrating the required laws and regulations into organizational policies; easy file-plan creation/management; as well as out-of-the-box time or event-driven disposition processing for records.
Because SharePoint does not meet the needs of all organizations, especially global enterprises or those in highly regulated industries, the need for an approach that integrates SharePoint with more robust information governance systems is evident. SharePoint must be supplemented by functionality that enables the automatic enforcement of information governance policies across jurisdictions, cloud-based and on-premise IT systems, and information repositories including paper record storage systems, and it must do so in a manner which is non-intrusive to the end-users of SharePoint.
The information governance approach selected for SharePoint environments must enable customers to govern all information created in SharePoint (on-premise and cloud) from a central location, without having to migrate SharePoint content to expensive, proprietary enterprise content management (ECM) repositories or other long-term archiving systems. The last thing an organization should have to do is move the content that has been created in SharePoint to another system simply to enable records management and governance capabilities. Furthermore, organizations require a mechanism to apply appropriate policies to information and enforce policy-defined levels of accessibility, protection and retention to content created and residing within SharePoint. A comprehensive information governance solution should enable organizations that use SharePoint to proactively manage the entire information lifecycle across all SharePoint sites.
It All Starts With Policy
Every information governance program requires sound, validated, actionable policies, which must incorporate the requirements of all corporate functions—business, legal, risk management, compliance, IT, privacy and executive management. If applicable, policies need to be designed to support multiple jurisdictions and need to be systematically enforced across all content repositories, in the cloud or on-premise.
A few years back, basic time-based retention and disposition were all that organizations needed to track, but that is no longer the case. Today, information management specialists recognize that an information asset has multiple distinct milestones in its lifetime. Moreover the lifecycle of content usually exceeds the one of the repository (or user) that created it making the management of information over time and over applications difficult if not impossible. Advanced policies should also integrate and manage more complex lifecycle actions such as being able to automate the move to a less expensive storage tier or to “anonymize” and declassify a record over time. Furthermore, policies need to link to corporate standard operating procedures, laws, regulations and more.
Automated and Transparent Governance
The ultimate goal is to have minimal impact on the SharePoint user experience while ensuring proper compliance with the right governance policies. An information governance platform should combine corporate policies with systematic enforcement and content orchestration across SharePoint farms, content repositories, and physical archives. A solid information governance platform that includes support for SharePoint lets you achieve this objective in a transparent, cost-efficient and pervasive manner.