Perfectly simpleTo all of my engineer friends in the med tech sector. Take note, this is one of the most elegantly simple and functional products ever developed. (IMHO). Aim for simplicity.
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![]() It's taken fewer number of years for the cell phone to become as ubiquitous as e-mail. Until, e-mail reached the point of the reliability of a dial-tone - not to many years back - it could not have been deemed ubiquitous. There are many factors, the snow ball effect, that needs to come to fruition simultaneously for any single technology to reach the point of being truly ubiquitous. In the case of email you have storage - the cost of storage, and storage technological advancements as major components that needed to mature in order for email to be part of the dial-tone reliability age. ![]() Today, all of us - from IT personnel to business and legal people - find ourselves engaged in conversation where data storage is the focus. Whether we are talking about buying a laptop for personal usage, "how much disk space do we need", or involved in a business and planning conversation at work - storage jargon is more and more becoming common speak today. Terms such as megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes are no longer reserved for the elite few who specialize in managing the company's storage infrastructure. Today, everyone is familiar with those common terms and we use them as part of our every day vocabulary. In fact, its probably safe to say that we all refer to megabytes, gigabytes and most recently we now talk of terabytes, in the same way that we talked about kilobytes and megabytes a decade or so ago. ![]() Depending on the industry and the typical damage periods (i.e. Anti-Trust where the damage period can go back 10-15 years on averge) most of the data needed for responding to legal discovery will reside on tape. So if you’ve recently implemented an archival strategy for capturing e-mails, where you can use the system for legal discovery, you may still need to deal with tape restores for quite some time, years even. It’s prudent to consider tape restoration to the archive as part of your implementation and strategy upfront. About the picture. PowderHorn 9310 tape library The cost for tape restoration can usually be high and typically involve third parties other than your archival vendor to deal with the factory style logistics needed for managing 100’s or maybe 1000’s of tapes. The key need however resides within the archive tier and it’s ability at the component layer to handle lower level e-mail formats such as internet standard RFC822, EML, DXML, etc. basically as many formats as possible, so that the avenues for re-ingestion are flexible. What’s more important however is the ability to separate or mark the data that is coming from tape, as such. Perhaps, keeping more than just a virtual store makes the most sense. ![]() Instant Messaging Summary: A criminal defendant convicted of assault claimed that instant messages threatening the victim should not have been admitted without authentication evidence of their source from the Internet Service Provider or the testimony of a computer forensics expert. The court rejected this argument, which it characterized as having the court create a whole new body of law just to deal with e-mails or instant messages. Although the court recognized that such digital messages are inherently unreliable because of their relative anonymity and the fact that while an electronic message can be traced to a particular computer it can rarely be connected to a specific author with any certainty, the court found that the same uncertainties exist with traditional written documents. Thus the court saw no justification for constructing unique rules of admissibility of electronic communications such as instant messages. Therefore, the court held that under Pennsylvania Rule of Evidence 901 circumstantial evidence, such as the contents of the writing and surrounding events, is sufficient to establish authenticity. In this case, the circumstantial evidence establishing authenticity included the fact that defendant had acknowledged his first name in one of the instant messages and had failed to dispute having sent the instant messages in verbal discussions shortly after their occurrence. ![]() E-Mail archival has taking several twists and turns over the last few years. The primary one is the use of the archive for legal discovery, sometimes referred to as eDiscovery. This has left many vendors flat footed and the reasons are in fact quite simple. Number one, the same product that you, if your a commerical software company,contruct for archiving and stubbing / the process of removing the e-mails from the mail server store, and relocating the physical bits to an archive server, and creating a link so that the end-user can seamlessly retrieve the bits from the archive server instead of the e-mail server. That solution value proposition is simple and strong. ![]() When we are going down the road of e-mail archiving for regulatory reasons is there a thing as 100% complete, or is 5 - 9’s accuracy good enough? What is the consequence for correct and complete as it relates to data archival systems deployed for compliance, legal discovery and ultimately corporate risk management. If you are challenged with the requirement for capturing all electronic communications (inbound/outbound) what mechanism, process or IT controls can help you to achieve 100% accuracy or better put - can guarantee both complete and correct results? Even in the best case scenario can you ever really account for technology outages, software bugs (that can occur at every layer below the application, firmware for example on a hardware device), or even good old fashion human error. Although the vision of an archival system gives you the impression that you are dealing with a very static durable almost simple piece of technology that houses long-term data - nothing could be further from the truth. ![]() Backup technologies, as they relate to the actual hardware and software involved in the backup process, have and continue to improve - more density, faster robotics, etc. etc. - it's an extensive list. However, what has not changed much over the last year is the actual "process" of backup execution. The process hasn’t changed much in over a decade, it’s a well tuned systematic process of incrementals, fulls, swapping tapes, sending tapes off-site, etc. As prices for the backup technology have dropped overall, their has been a lack of attention paid to the actual cost of data stored on tape, but the cost today, is being fueled by a completely different rationale - compliance. {For the purpose of this discussion let's define compliance simply as governance of data as it relates to an organizations legal and regulatory liabilities or requirements} ![]() To delete or not to delete, this now appears to be one of the holy grails of the e-mail archival industry, and it’s extending beyond regulated industries. On the surface, you would think that the regulatory industry is the best suited for deleting e-mails as the regulations are very specific for how long particular e-mails have to be kept. What more could you ask for, you have it in black in white, from the government in a loud booming voice "thou shall keep the Equity traders e-mails for a period of 5 years, thou shall only delete it after the prescribed period has come and gone". So what’s the issue with deleting that e-mail on it’s 5 year anniversary date? With today’s systems you can schedule the deletion for the exact second it reaches it’s 5 year anniversary. So again, what’s the big deal, well let’s take a look at look at it from the opposite perspective. ![]() Let’s suppose that a user’s local hard-drive (or shared file system) contains the following directories with the file entries listed below: >>directory1>projects>ibm>file1.doc (note, these are the same file) >>directory1>projects>ibm>file2.doc >>directory1>projects>ibm>file3.doc >>directory2>projects>oracle>file1.doc (note, these are the same file) >>directory2>projects>oracle>file4.doc >>directory2>projects>oracle>file5.doc Now, your company is joined in a legal suit and received a discovery request for relevant documents to the legal matter. You are now on the receiving end of having to find and produce relevant documents in a very important legal matter. On the surface the request seems clear, "all relevant documents", well after many rounds of legal back and forth (the discovery order is to broad, etc.) the discovery request is now understood and amended to specify "documents" containing the word "IBM" Now comes the conundrum. |
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April 2014
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