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FILE SYSTEM ARCHIVING: AUTOMATED MANAGEMENT OF FILE SYSTEM CONTENT
Unstructured electronic files (such as Microsoft® Office, Adobe® PDF, and others) creates a critical management challenge for enterprise organizations. System administrators responsible for protecting and managing unstructured information are facing rapid storage growth and shrinking backup windows that reduce overall data protection and increase storage costs.
One of the most common places for end-users to store content is on network file systems. There is the perception of safety — content is stored on a company server insulated from a desktop hard drive crash — and of central management because the content is off the desktop. The reality is that file system content is virtually unmanaged without library services, indexes, and version control.
Organizations are faced with additional challenges:
- Storage costs soar out of control as high-end production systems grow unfettered with old data and various users store multiple copies of the same content.
- Files corresponding to a specific user role or department are not retained and can be deleted by end-users.
- eDiscovery costs are high due to un-indexed content, silo collection efforts and redundant content processing and review.
- Risks increase due to potential sensitive information (e.g. Intellectual property, salary data, and patient health data) unknowingly residing on file systems.
NearPoint File System Archiving (FSA)
With NearPoint FSA, administrators can easily set policy to crawl file shares and capture files based on archival policies. Captured files are indexed and archived; NearPoint will then de-duplicate across multiple file shares, as well as across messages and attachments for true global single instancing across content sources. Thus NearPoint FSA enables retention/disposition policies of targeted files and enables search and eDiscovery of files in the corporate environment.
Optionally, files on file shares can be extended, replacing the files with small stub files. End-users still access the files seamlessly as they normally would. Extension policies on files are based on such attributes as type, size, and age. NearPoint utilizes advanced stubbing technology that optimizes use of network resources and storage during stub file operations. Thus NearPoint FSA enables significant reduction in expensive production storage. Key Benefits
- Achieve significant storage cost savings by moving files off high-end production storage.
- Proactively preserve select files and enforce retention and disposition policies on files.
- Lower the risk and costs of eDiscovery by proactively preserving files that can be searched from a single user interface alongside messages and attachments in a unified archive.
- Dramatically reduce archive storage needed by leveraging a common backend with de-duplication (global single instancing) across files, email attachments and other content types.
- Achieve consistent retention policy application across emails, IMs, and files from one administrative interface.
- Mitigate risk by gaining visibility into otherwise unmanaged file content.
- Advanced file extension by replacing files with small stubs based on policies of age, size, access date, etc. and providing seamless user access to the files, while avoiding the data integrity issues that have traditionally caused stub corruption.
- Enable faster, more granular file recovery and reduce the need to restore backup tapes.
- Avoid conflicts with backup routines - "follow the stub" - by using NearPoint FSA for backup and disaster recovery.
- Eliminate the "ping-pong" effect of files being restored to the file server when opened by utilizing NearPoint's advanced file extension capabilities.
- Simplify administration with expressive rules-based capture policies.
- Provides an integrated content archive for emails, attachments, instant messages, and files.
Integrated Content Archive
Unlike other FSA products in the market that store content in multiple archive instantiations, NearPoint is the next-generation single repository - all content is stored in one highly-scalable archive. Email has dominated the headlines and ESG reports that 80% of organizations have been asked to produce emails and attachment in response to discovery requests. What is not as widely publicized is that a full 60% of organizations have been asked to produce unmanaged general office documents (see Figure 1). Mimosa NearPoint ends reactive eDiscovery fire-drills by providing a unified repository for messaging content and file content with one single search experience for eDiscovery.
Which of the following record types has your organization been asked to produce in a legal proceeding or regulatory inquiry?
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