Today's Collaboration Initiatives
The scalability of the collaboration service you can create with your ideal unified data management framework should also include automation in every key aspect in order to reduce the overall cost of services. New services can be created and contracted at reduced cost due to the extensibility of the framework. What does this mean? Business users can enjoy faster access to only the data they require to complete their projects, regardless of where that content is stored.
Software, hardware and geography agnostic. Allowing for the growth of new technologies, your ideal unified data management framework should take both a software and hardware agnostic approach to the management of data. Business users don't care where content is stored on the back-end—they just want to find it quickly so they can collaborate and complete their projects. Data management strategies should utilize common virtualization techniques wherever possible to ensure the mobility of data, and common frameworks for data classification, records management, access controls, and content management will establish a seamless user experience regardless of the platform.
The ideal unified data management framework can help you create a collaboration service that will be consumed globally by including access and rights management controls based on identity and location, user and content lifecycle reporting, and continuous monitoring. These can all lead to a more secure, more effective, and subsequently less vulnerable environment. Access policies can be governed by user identity, the nature of the content itself (e.g. is it public, internal, confidential or highly confidential), and the user's current location.
Unified Data Management in Action
It's important to recognize that risk and governance, even records information management (RIM), is not just an IT issue—it touches every business unit in your company. Many organizations today face the challenge of abiding by several policies relating to the collaboration of users and the securing of content. Let's use a major insurance, annuities, and employee benefit provider as an example. In this case, implementing a unified data management framework means setting global policies to govern content and apply records management policies according to established organizational procedures for storing that content.
The procedures were dictated by records and legal departments that were not members of IT, which meant the reporting and tracking mechanism for the system needed to be consumable by both business and technology.
The unified data management framework must be flexible enough to not only meet the tenets of laws and regulations today, but the modifications that could come in the future. As such, protecting records using a unified data management framework can be achieved with a three-phased approach:
- Applying a RIM policy on any internal assets created;
- Monitoring of a policy by geography and/or business unit; and
- Disposition of content from creation to expiration in the records management system.
The unified data management framework can then automate the application and disposition of RIM policies to remove any burden on knowledge workers or content librarians, allowing teams to focus on collaboration and not the management of records. This leads to faster innovation, with the confidence that the records are protected and compliant with relevant regulations. This is the end-goal of today's unified data management framework.
The key to unlocking unified data management to drive better and faster collaboration is through information governance and records management. The influx of data coming in from all angles, people, and platforms is not going to stop. Business is moving too quickly for that to happen.
The unified data management framework that organizations must build today must be able to stitch together existing data and application platforms in order to support business self-service, IT chargeback and compliance transparency to optimize productivity, data management efficiency and mitigate risk.
In doing so, the framework will play a key role in eliminating information silos, accelerating appropriate information flow, and help business users access information they need faster to complete their projects while ensuring that content is properly governed and meets relevant compliance regulations. This helps to address the need to advance business, manage human capital churn and cost cutting, and embrace the trends of BYOD, enterprise social, cloud, and big data access-all while meeting regulatory compliance statutes and regulations.
Read more about AvePoint's solutions by visiting www.avepoint.com.