Define a Document Retention Policy

A decade ago, corporations tended not to keep many hard copies of documents because paper documents took up costly physical space. Now, with 93 per cent of all business documents created electronically and only 30 per cent ever printed to paper, companies save nearly every electronic document and e-mail because it can be stored electronically with relative ease. In response to this techno-reality, corporations are implementing and enforcing document retention policies more than ever before.

In most organisations there are umpteen different versions of the same document, none of which were ever finalised or published and given a formal approval stamp. That means when someone searches for a piece of information, they find lots of different versions, forcing them to put a management overhead into working out which is the correct version and which one was eventually signed off. Hillard says it is critical that one of the policies is about document retention and getting sign-off on documents.

"You want to actually have proper knowledge management policies, which ensure that only finalised documents are published and that unapproved drafts are destroyed, not retained, or moved off to secondary storage and don't form part of the knowledge network," he says.

Develop a Document Differentiation Plan

Australian business units are pushing CIOs and IT managers to give them a mission-critical environment with remote mirroring, snapshots and high availability, without having any idea how much this will cost.

According to Jose Goldmann, principal of Australian data storage consultancy SLI-Consulting, the best counterattack a CIO can launch is to initiate a storage differentiation plan. He says under such a plan the organisation might have an enterprise-class infrastructure used for mission-critical environments where data can be retrieved within two to four hours, a second tier used to address the storage needs of the business-critical environment where data can be retrieved within 24 hours, and another tier for all the rest.

"It is those storage differentiation plans that will give you a better understanding how much one of those subsystems will cost you," he says. "For example, for mission-critical, you can put a dollar value of $50 per megabyte; looking at the business-critical environment, you put maybe $20 per megabyte; and then the normal day-to-day storage infrastructure, you can put maybe a $5 per megabyte in there."

Go back to the business manager with such detailed costings and he or she will quickly start thinking differently and in a much more discriminatory manner about the business unit's storage needs, he says.

This approach has two advantages: it helps the organisation gain a much clearer understanding of the infrastructure, while making it easier to charge storage back to the business units and making those business units accountable for their storage use. And Goldmann says this approach makes it possible to drastically reduce storage costs, given studies by Gartner and Meta that suggest after seven days in storage, 80 per cent of the data the organisation holds will never be retrieved.

Finally, make sure that as the organisation moves to adopt storage management solutions designed to move storage handling from manual to automatic, you ensure any product you buy adheres to storage management standards.

Mark Heers, chairman of Storage Networking Industry Association Australia New Zealand (SNIA), says last year SNIA brought out its first specification for storage management standards - SNIA SMI (Storage Management Initiative).

"What we're seeing this year and next year is most of the vendors will start producing SNIA-compliant products and software and services. That means customers should ensure that anything they are choosing is in keeping with organisations like SNIA's directions."

Sticking to standards should help companies considerably in their bid to lower storage costs, Heers says.