6 signs of an effective data management strategy

Data Management Priority – Why choose email:

Protecting email data is the priority for any organization’s data management strategy.

80%-90% of data in any organization is unstructured (IDC)

95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business (Forbes)

A bulk of unstructured data is in email; Emails carry 60% of business-critical information (IDC)

Over hundreds of conversations with customers and prospects, we have realized that most organizations have some data management strategy to protect and govern their email data. 

But, on closer inspection, we observed severe shortcomings that rendered their data management strategy ineffective and risky.

And on several occasions, the businesses were blissfully unaware of the risks presented by their currently deployed strategy.

So is there an easy way to know if you are managing your email data effectively?

Over time, we learned that there are six signs of an effective email data management strategy:

1. Your email data is automatically captured at the source and protected centrally.

Effective Data Management:

By automating the capture of all emails before they are delivered, you ensure the archival of 100% of the email data generated in your organization. 

In addition, storing all this email data in a central, consolidated repository gives you the flexibility to easily find and extract any data.

Learn more

v/s Ineffective Data Management:

Traditional methods such as endpoint backups, single box journaling, local archives result in fragmented data across multiple storage devices. 

Since these methods are periodic, they may miss capturing (critical) emails, increasing risks.

These methods also need manual intervention, thereby reducing productivity. 

And, these fragmented stores make data security, discovery, and extraction extraordinarily challenging and risky.

Related: 5 Data Management Strategies: A Guide to Selecting Email Backup, Archiving, or Journaling For your Enterprise

2. Your data management platform preserves emails in an operational infrastructure separate from your primary email solution.

Peace of Mind: 

By preserving a portable copy of your email data in a separate platform from your primary mail solution, you gain from the redundancy and resilience of having your backup separate from its source. Learn more.

Besides reduced risk, you can also better manage your primary mailbox storage and optimize costs by avoiding plan upgrades for additional storage. Learn more.

v/s High Risk of Vendor lock-in:

Storing your archive/backup on another product on the same platform as your primary email solution can increase the risks of data or vendor lock-in. 

And, extracting large volumes of data from most email solutions is challenging due to the limits imposed by these platforms to protect their infrastructure from overload. 

3. Your email data in the data management solution is immutable.

Compliance Ready:

Your email archive/data management solution preserves the email data in its original form, tamper-proof, and unchangeable over time, ensuring that your data is ready for use in litigations or audits to ensure compliance with regulations. 

v/s Ever unsure:

Storing data in traditional offline storage, with no well-defined access roles, may leave the data open to tampering or pilferage.

And, these acts will typically not leave any audit trails, thus leaving you ever unsure of the safety or immutability of your data.

4. Your email archive/backup is preserved in highly durable storage.

Highly available cloud storage systems:

Your emails are stored on highly durable cloud stores with built-in redundancies and provisioned for cross-site disaster recovery, effectively delivering 11 9’s of data durability. 

You never, ever lose data.

Learn more.

v/s reduced storage availability:

Achieving 11 9’s of durability with traditional infrastructure elements requires heavy investment and deep design and engineering skills.

As a result, most traditional backup systems deliver sub-optimal durability increasing the risk of data loss, corruption, or even a total wipeout.

93 percent of companies that lost their data center for 10 or more days from a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington).

5. You can find and extract any email data with ease and quickly using your data management solution

A few seconds to a few hours to respond to a DSAR (Data Subject Access Request):

Your data management solution provides you with the necessary tools to quickly find and extract the required email data. 

The ediscovery tool lets you find emails matching mail attributes, keywords, and date ranges combined in boolean expressions for deep searches. 

Depending on the age of the data, your search request may provide results in a few seconds to a few hours at max.

v/s days and weeks to respond to a DSAR:

Traditional data management strategies end up with unwieldy architectures, making discovery and extraction a considerable challenge. 

It’s not uncommon to hear of a DSAR request taking a few days to a few weeks, and in some extreme cases, not happening at all.

6. Your data management solution optimizes costs along the data lifecycle.

Multi-level storage for aging infrequently used data

Your data management solution can split data across an Active (hot) store for frequent access use cases and an Open (cold) Store for aging, infrequently used data, thereby supporting cost-optimal data protection across the complete data lifecycle.

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v/s a shared storage for all data

Traditional methods typically store all data on a standard storage device or may fragment across similar storage mediums.

This uniform storage architecture does not help optimize costs depending on the age or use of the data in the current context.

Conclusion

All businesses are or are soon going to be data-driven. 

Thus, effectively protecting and managing data is not an option anymore. It’s even mandated by the law now. 

Review your data management strategy against these six parameters to get a sense of how effective it is.

A data management strategy falling short on any of these 6 parameters may leave your organization open to risk, escalating costs, and poor agility.

How Vaultastic can add value to your data management strategy:

Vaultastic delivers effective Email Data Protection and Management for the cloud era. 

Mithi’s Vaultastic is a cloud-native platform built on AWS. Vaultastic can ingest email data from various platforms and legacy data sources into a central repository. 

SaaS tools for discovery, governance, and extraction dramatically increase visibility and availability of business-critical data locked in email boxes. While also reducing the risk, cost, and complexity of managing and protecting it. 

The Vaultastic Platform supports Governance, Data Preservation, Compliance, Storage Management, Legacy Data Protection, and other Data Management use cases. Complete life cycle services, a flexible pricing model, and the AWS cloud platform back Vaultastic.

Related: Email Archiving Software Comparison: SaaS v/s Private Cloud v/s On-Premise