Today's Collaboration Initiatives

Enterprises face unprecedented challenges in an ever-changing regulatory and competitive environment. In many areas, there is still human capital churn, drastic cost cutting and disruptive technology trends—including bring your own device, enterprise social, cloud and big data access—that must be addressed by IT departments. How can they rise to the challenge of providing the right level of infrastructure and strategic systems to enable businesses to be self-sustaining?

There are myriad solutions on the market today for structuring data management—including but certainly not limited to data quality, data integration, data governance, metadata and master data management, content management and information lifecycle management.

There are also countless collaboration platforms that organizations use today. A short list includes Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Lync, Box.net, Dropbox, Yammer, Jive, Salesforce Chatter and more—not to mention the fact that email and file shares are still prevalent today. The key is that there are so many. Organizations are struggling to stitch together their existing investments and actually extract value from a unified data management strategy.

What exactly is a unified data management strategy? It's one that integrates your disparate information silos and allows users to enable repositories to store, organize, access and deliver the business information they need to do their jobs, all the while having enterprisewide manageability, scalability and governance.

Therein lies the rub. How do you lock down vital, precious corporate intellectual property from falling into the wrong hands, yet make sure that everyone in your company—whether they are in an office or working remotely—have the right information they can share and use to be successful? You can't have one without the other, a delicate balance must be reached. You can't just open the doors to all information because it opens you to a litany of regulatory compliance issues as well as a lack of any understanding as to which data is useful. Yet if you lock down everything entirely—it can act as a bottleneck to rapid innovation and collaboration, which is vital in today's ever-evolving business markets.

At first glance, outsourcing may seem to be the answer because it can include a mixture of hardware, legacy data, and application platform management—which could reduce the perception of the fixed capital expenditure required to support your business since outsourcing can be an operational expenditure. However, it's just a temporary solution that won't save costs in the long run or boost the innovation velocity of your business without a truly integrated effort to drive a unified data management strategy that possesses the following qualities:

• Hardware and application agnostic;
• Ties together data across legacy platforms and prescriptively moves data silos toward a unified collaboration platform;
• Enables businesses with familiar tools and self-service as opposed to maintaining a reliance on another party to manage and provision information assets; and
• Exhibits compliance and risk awareness so data is secured, monitored and tracked.

How can we do this? It's best to look at your ideal unified data management framework as being fortified by four pillars: productivity, risk and governance, variable cost and chargeback, and ensuring it is agnostic with regard to software, hardware and geography.

Productivity. Collaboration must be natural and easy. The experience must be seamless to end users, whether they are accessing content on their laptop at work, tablet at home, or smartphone while on the road. Content today is often created in silos across all of the different platforms we've mentioned and more. The problem is that this makes knowledge workers less effective at gaining insights as well as leads to duplication of efforts, increased storage costs, and risks in the creation of unregulated information.

A successful unified data management framework will enable you to federate search across multiple repositories, extending knowledge workers' reach on common threads of knowledge like user account information or common tags. The framework should also enable your organization to dynamically scale and allow for collaboration spaces on-demand, allowing fast access to existing content and automating the regulation of new data—ultimately aiding in faster time to value and helping workers gain access to the right information they need faster to successfully complete their projects.

Risk and governance. Unstructured content is frequently the biggest source of risk for many organizations today. Analyzing where sensitive data lives, what geography is appropriate for the data, who is accessing the content, and what regulations must be attached to the content will be a continuous computer-assisted check. In an ideal unified data management framework scenario, all data will be subject to audits-both those accessible to content owners as well as external legal parties. On an ongoing basis, it's imperative that IT management, compliance teams, and others can rapidly and proactively identify areas of non-compliance, prioritize the business needs, diagram new security and access boundaries, implement appropriate modifications to resolve issues, and maintain control.

It's important to enable organizations to implement an information architecture that addresses compliance requirements for all managed content, including existing content and content transferred or uploaded in real time. The framework should support the implementation of automated access and content controls to maximize efficiency and access for business user productivity while also helping to prevent breaches from happening.

Once classified, the framework should automatically process and protect privacy information based on pre-defined rules to prevent exposure to users that should not have access to content. By blocking, quarantining, publishing, and moving content to the appropriate place or automatically restricting permissions and access, we can drastically limit risk of exposure. For business users, this means they will automatically be unable to access content they should not be able to access—which aligns to pre-established policies and procedures as well as offers a teaching moment for business users to determine which documents they can access. By automating this process, it's possible to ensure proper risk management without implementing roadblocks to productivity.

Variable cost and chargeback. A unified data management system designed to host content for the users in your organization must be optimized for management and scale to accommodate the hyper-competitive and ever-shifting market environment today. Storage optimization of unstructured data will reduce capital expenditure given each year to provision new hardware or storage servers. Other focus areas include:

• Securing of local data regionally by policy;
• Reducing the amount of content using de-duplication;
• Tiered asset management planning to allow businesses to pay based on activity on their content as opposed to volume; and
• Leasing of content for efficient lifecycle management.

As audit trails are gathered, businesses will be able to assess the value of the data management service provided by examining volume of data at rest and user activity. The chargeback systems allow predictable fixed cost by volume for data at rest, while identifying highly accessed or valuable content and allowing a pay-by-activity model. All content services can be leased, meaning that content will carry a cost throughout its lifecycle but be promptly removed at the termination of a given lease.