Information Governance for Cloud Storage Systems and Platforms
The adoption of cloud technology has rapidly increased throughout the enterprise in the last two years. Forrester predicts that the market for cloud computing will grow from $41 billion to $241 billion by 2020. The range of benefits offered by using cloud services and the maturity of cloud vendors is driving adoption at the global level. More and more companies are using cloud technologies and managed services to accelerate business initiatives, allowing them to be more agile and flexible, and reduce costs. Employees are utilizing cloud-based storage technologies for corporate records and this is raising new challenges for organizations.
Every organization has information stored across a multitude of systems, computers, shared drives, repositories, and now much of that information is moving to the cloud. This is going to require a new approach and new technologies in order to address the challenges arising from the growing volume and format of information being generated within the traditional IT infrastructure as well as within cloud-based storage systems and repositories.
Managing cloud-based content may be new to an organization and as a result there might be uncertainty over the risks involved and the various approaches to mitigate them. Sometimes the content is already in the cloud and was originally created by a cloud-based collaboration system, social media application, a cloud-based ECM system, or simply stored there by an end user. In other cases, use of the cloud means that an organization’s content has left the confines of the internal corporate network and has been relocated to the cloud. Most of the cloud repositories currently lack information governance and record management capabilities. This means that an appropriate architecture and supporting processes have to be put in place to ensure that content is properly governed and managed.
By coupling a cloud-enabled information governance platform with those cloud content repositories, your organization ?will be able to immediately turn those cloud-based repositories into a compliance system while letting business end-users continue to make use of them.
Information Governance in a Hybrid World
Information governance (IG) must be able to be deployed within a traditional IT infrastructure, a cloud-based environment, a hybrid of traditional and cloud, and IG must be able to govern information stored on-premise or in the cloud. Information governance is rapidly moving toward an enterprise service model—enabling companies to deploy shared services across the complex IT infrastructure. Information governance, as standard shared services of IT infrastructure, eliminates dependence on users and enables uniform governance across all applications and systems.
In order to remain competitive and maintain costs, organizations must consider information governance as a service. The days of proprietary governance capabilities that are tied to silo proprietary applications or systems are coming to an end.
Technologies with a flexible central policy engine, capable of managing the challenges of complex, federated governance environments are going to be the ones that enable organizations to make the most strategic use of information. These technologies have an enforcement model not tied to a specific store or repository of assets, but leverage standards to enable automatic enforcement across all systems, repositories, applications and platforms.
It’s clear that the cloud is here to stay, making it that much more important for organizations to consider information governance solutions that provide both on premise and cloud-based deployment enabling governance of information either on premise or in the cloud.