Introduction

The tumultuous events of the last 12 months have challenged us all. Looking ahead, those hoping for a gentle return to previous ways of working are – it pains me to predict – heading for further disappointment. The global information management (infogov) community faces an inescapable truth: the pandemic did not slow down regulatory change or the amount of data requiring management.

Making matters worse is the looming spectre of operational cutbacks, as organizations feel the negative economic impact of the past year: the IMF’s World Economic Outlook of October 2020 shows economic contraction of over 4 percent in 2020.

Yet the task of effective enterprise information management nevertheless lingers at the fringes of our operational bandwidth and internal priorities. Which begs the question: what has changed since the last time the organization considered information governance strategy?

Remote Working

As most of us know from personal experience, the commercial world has adopted a remote working model. Very few traditional office jobs remain office-based. “Remote collaboration in some form or another is the new normal,” as this blog puts it. Users, administrators, and teammates have had to rethink their infrastructure and means of collaboration.

And that re-think needs action. Reports suggest that 61 percent of remote workers are using personal devices as their primary method to access company networks. It is anyone’s guess what security and operational risks may follow.

Diverse Data

The volume of data, and the velocity of its growth, continue to astonish us. Analysts at IDC recently reported in their Data Age 2025 report the projection of the global datasphere to be in the region of 175 Zettabytes, at a CAGR of 61 percent. This bewildering scale represents an explosion in various forms of unstructured data (voice, image, video, social media), rendering more traditional approaches to data collection and management unfit for purpose.  

The lost art of keeping a secret

Against a backdrop of rising data comes further requirements to curate it appropriately. GDPR needs no introduction, but there are over 100 countries globally who are subject to regional data privacy laws and other forms of regulation. In just a few years we’ve seen the following added –

• Vermont Act 171 of 2018 Data Broker Regulation
• California Consumer Privacy Act
• Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD)
• India Personal Data Protection Bill
• Chile Privacy Bill Initiative
• New Zealand Privacy Bill
• Turkey Data Protection Law
• Australia Consumer Data Right legislation

And that’s before we consider industry vertical-specific compliance measures, in force across financial services, healthcare and elsewhere. As Gwen Huret expressed in her recent article on the topic of post-pandemic privacy, “Regulations and external circumstances are constantly changing … data management strategy should be long-term if it wants to be effective”.

A Perfect Storm?

As far back as 2017, Compliance Week reported that 93% of respondents experienced compliance challenges related to information governance. Now layer on the increasing complexity and volume of challenges, regulations and data. Then add the impact of a pandemic. It is hard to overstate the importance of a robust information management strategy.

The article “A Perfect Information Management Storm” adroitly summarises the challenge faced by information governance professionals, “Records and information management became imperative during this time to ensure the most appropriate protocols were in place for data security. Without security to keep information private, and without an effective document management protocol, organisations risk cyber-breaches, lost records, broken customer or citizen trust, and non-compliance with regulations.”

The Secret’s Out: Smarter Content Management

The issues outlined above are far from trivial, nor are they abating. A genuinely strategic approach to these challenges is not only desirable, but also essential.  That approach starts with the basic premise that data is a strategic asset, to be centrally controlled, secured and categorized.

Appropriate technology will need to cover a range of functional capabilities to support information governance in the remote-work era:

• It must support access and communication between users who are disconnected, and often outside the firewall
• It must support a rapidly expanding scale of data volume and variety without impacting performance or cost
• It must offer efficiency in terms of time to resolution of investigation, ingestion of data, end user experience and search results
• It must be flexible in terms of consumption, access speeds
• It must allow for a wide variety of analyses to ensure categorization of information can be made at the record, or element level, regardless of data source
• All aspects of operation, from the point of access to the data elements in question must conform to tight internal and external security controls and regulations.
• Finally, and vitally, privacy should be woven into the fabric of operational best-practice. Technology plays a huge part in that, as does the right cultural attitude towards it.

Securing and Managing Critical Content

If the above requirements sound like a lofty ambition, an enterprise scale solution requires nothing less. Such solutions will need to evolve, of course, to offer the next generation of performance, scale, flexibility, user experience, regulatory shifts and data variety – such is the constant evolution of need. 

As such, enterprises need to take a smarter approach to organizational data based on its content or sensitivity level. Proactively assessing data enables organizations to encrypt any document with personal information in it, archive and secure data with financial information in it, and then securely delete this information at the right time.

Micro Focus’ perspective is that data is a strategic business commodity, and organizations should be able to treat it accordingly. The Micro Focus IM&G portfolio tackles the comprehensive data lifecycle requirements of today’s organization, from input and ingestion through discovery, categorization, management, protection, and reporting, archiving and advanced analytics. Our mantra, “Insight Empowered”, is about smart teams deriving smarter insights from their data.

At the heart of this solution lies our enterprise scale content management solution, Micro Focus Content Manager. Featuring unlimited querying, flexible user types and an enriched user experience, our latest Content Manager releases offer greater support for today’s most challenging content management and compliance-related activities.

Take a look at Micro Focus’ new Content Manager Select offering. Attend this webinar to learn more about the upcoming release. Now is the winter of secure content...........

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