Proven Practices for Content Management
Many organizations read about data leakage and the subsequent multi-million dollar fines on the front page of newspapers around the world, but many fail to realize that essentially it comes down to proper content management. If and when a content management breach does occur, solutions—whether manual or automated—must allow the appropriate personnel to swiftly detect those breaches, track, respond, and recover. This mitigates the likelihood of a catastrophic incident, such as those experienced by Sony, Sutter Health, LinkedIn, and countless thousands of other smaller companies worldwide. It will also help to gather information to perpetuate system hardening and improvements for the continuous lifecycle that must make up a successful risk management program for the content and information flowing through your SharePoint deployment.
Ongoing assessments. In order to ensure established plans and governance architecture continue to meet business requirements—and information access is exposing your organization to minimal risk—ongoing assessment is required. The adage, "You can't manage what you can't measure" rings true here as well. It is imperative that organizations conduct ongoing testing of business solutions, monitoring of system response times, service availability and user activity, as well as assessments to ensure that you have complied with your guidelines and standards for properly managing the content. Remember that the content is essentially your intellectual property, the lifeblood that sustains your organization. Just as we should go for checkups and monitor our own personal health to proactively prevent as well as detect issues as they crop up, it's important that you treat the content management of your SharePoint deployment in the same manner.
Reacting and revising as necessary. Earlier, we discussed the importance of establishing an effective risk management lifecycle. This means you are not done once you have completed the three steps we've already outlined. Think about this as a routine more so than a race. It's a lifestyle. You must repeat these steps over and over—the frequency will depend upon your particular business and technical requirements, but it cannot only take place once. In order to continue to mitigate risk, respond to evolving requirements, and harden security and access controls, we must take information gathered in your ongoing assessments and use that to make more intelligent management decisions. Once modifications to your governance architecture—whether that is your information architecture or security architecture—are implemented, you must continue to assess and react and revise as necessary. With each change, we must continue to validate that our system meets necessary guidelines and standards. SharePoint's delegated administrative rights allow us to potentially streamline the implementation of any required changes. However, in order to validate that changes were made and further automate this process, organizations can utilize PowerShell commands natively in SharePoint or third-party solutions to swiftly implement required permissions modifications or content restructuring.
The Next Battlefield
Content management is the next battlefield that today's organization must step onto in order to fight the war of succeeding in today's competitive business landscape. It's not just about storage management or security management—it encompasses both fronts that must be addressed in a comprehensive strategy. The risk has never been higher, especially as more data is created amidst an ever-growing regulatory compliance landscape mandating organizations to ensure its content and information is properly managed. There is no single blueprint or single technology—even SharePoint—that you can take to the front lines to solve content management on its own. However, if you develop a plan, implement a governance architecture that supports that plan, assess the architecture on an ongoing basis, and react and revise as necessary, your organization will have the support and agility necessary to truly use all of the content and information it possesses to improve business connectivity, innovation velocity and competitiveness while lowering total cost of ownership.
Managing File Share Content in SharePoint with AvePoint
The problem: Organizations have various types of content on their file servers and have difficulty determining what is necessary for their specific business initiatives, and what should be decommissioned or archived according to defined retention policies. The overall time taken to remove unstructured content from a structured database is inefficient, resulting in longer index times and slower response to SharePoint end-users.
The solution: Determining what the main issues are regarding your file shares, defining the best-suited options, and embarking on the avenue to the most optimal solution for your unstructured data with AvePoint.
AvePoint offers a range of solutions to help you better manage your file share content in SharePoint—whether you want to simply expose large files, rich media and other file share content in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 without migration, or take steps toward platform consolidation with a comprehensive migration solution.
- DocAve File Share Navigator: Expose large files and rich media, including files more than 2 GB, in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 environments through direct links without migration.
- DocAve Connector: Offer a more seamless experience for collaborating upon network file shares and cloud storage resources directly through SharePoint without migration.
- DocAve Migrators: Facilitate the consolidation of all enterprise-wide content on SharePoint to decommission file shares or other legacy document management systems in order to further streamline content and IT management.
Read more about AvePoint's solutions for File Share Management by visiting http://www.avepoint.com/file-share-management