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5 Projects for Purging Data and Managing Long-Term Liability

These steps will help you begin building and executing a defensible deletion strategy.

• 06/25/2012

By Jim McGann

Organizations are facing exponential data growth and are struggling to keep up. Some of the data maintains its importance to a business over time, but most of it loses value and languishes on networks and legacy backup tapes for years. Because the price of storage has decreased, the perception exists that it is cheaper and easier to keep everything forever, causing data to be stockpiled and archived for decades. This thinking is now being questioned as the legal and regulatory climate has evolved and turned stored data into a significant liability.

Defensible deletion strategies are fast becoming commonplace in organizations that are facing frequent litigation and regulatory requirements. Identifying data that has no business value, but has the potential to become a liability, has become a key component of information governance programs in every industry. IT organizations are tasked to better understand corporate data assets. The sheer scope often delays the start, as companies struggle to engage and receive sign-off from all stakeholders and find an agreed-upon plan of attack.

With this in mind, we present five steps you can take immediately to start cleaning house by targeting some of the most sensitive and potentially high-risk data, so you can manage risk and liability. Combining these with a series of manageable, attainable projects will provide an initial road map and turn a daunting task into a logical process of analysis and action.

Project #1: Remove obsolete PSTs

Users save all their e-mail and are afraid to delete anything in the event they need it in the future. Although most e-mail messages contain normal business communication, an important subset of a user's messages contains agreements, directives, and other sensitive correspondence.

Data mapping is a process that provides the information you need to make decisions about PST files. A data map tells you the exact location of all PST files, who owns them, when they were last modified or accessed, and more. Working with legal, a list of PST files can be examined, and based on policy, potentially be purged in large volumes. Common criteria for purging PST files include files that:

• Have not been accessed or modified in more than three years
• Are owned by ex-employees who are no longer associated with the organization
• Are redundant or duplicate copies

PST files that do not fit the classifications above -- and, as a result, are not easily deleted -- can be reviewed and managed according to policies based on their contents. One option is to move PST files to a central server to make them more manageable rather than letting them reside on user desktops. This allows the user to maintain access to legacy e-mail while ensuring that they can be monitored for any legal or compliance reasons. In this environment, an up-to-date index or data map of the PSF file content is a critical component to managing this e-mail according to policy. Once rogue PST files are purged and a data map is created for the remaining PST files, managing them will be significantly easier.