The methods by which the increasingly large amounts of data in today’s organisations are managed, stored, archived and retrieved are of paramount importance in terms of risk mitigation.

Data security is a serious consideration in the light of corporate compliance legislation that requires companies to archive all data that could be required in a legal discovery operation at some point in the future, says John Hope-Bailie, a director of Channel Data.

“Unfortunately many companies do not seek out advice from data storage and retrieval specialists until after they have experienced a severe or costly data loss and consequent disruption of business.”

He says companies often believe that the ease at which desktop data storage devices can be added and data managed via downloadable software from Google and other vendors can be mirrored in the corporate environment.

“Unfortunately it can’t,” he stresses. “There is no silver bullet. Effective, secure data management on a large scale is not that simple.

“Take email archiving for instance. Regulations require that companies store all email messages so that any legal discovery process will be expedited by an email trail.

“However, retrieving email data is complex and finding specific data can be problematic. Lost data is a common occurrence as retrieval systems fail to deliver on their promises.”

One of the reasons, he says, is the difficulty in separating business data from the clutter of private data that normally resides in corporate data storage repositories.

“The challenge is to identify business data, which could represent a small fraction – as little as 20% - of the unstructured data within an organisation. By eliminating private data held on corporate databases security would improve dramatically and retrieval rates would soar,” he says.

Focusing on the subject of data retrieval, Hope-Bailie says the systems available today to accurately identify specific data held deep in corporate archives are embryonic and the cause of concern for many data centre managers.

“It’s a sector of the IT industry that is evolving – from the ‘information lifecycle management’ and ‘tiered data storage’ technologies so popular two to three years ago. But the technologies are complex and require the intervention of specialists in order to optimise them.”

Hope-Bailie notes that while data filtering and de-duplication systems are helping to streamline data storage and archiving methodologies, organisations are relying far too heavily on policy implementation solutions to help decide what can - and what can’t - be archived.

“In many cases these systems are less than efficient. So, with the cost of memory becoming cheaper and disk drives becoming larger every year, the temptation to simply ‘save everything’ is great. But it should be resisted on security and data integrity grounds,” he adds.