Executive summary
Enterprise data archiving currently stands at a crossroads. The volume of data is rising at a rapid pace, social media are starting to make a significant share of official business records, and new laws on customer privacy protection give more freedom to consumers than ever before. At the same time, archiving solutions are becoming more advanced, and steadily moving to cloud.
Going forward, the landscape will change even more, with the volume of data being generated at an unprecedented rate. Meanwhile, more and more communication channels will start being deployed for business communication. And at the same time, companies will have to navigate between compliance with retention laws compliance and compliance with personal data protection laws.
In this ebook, we will look at the top five trends that will shape the year of 2023, including record retention laws, the role of social media, the implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act and its implications, functionalities that archiving software of the future needs to possess, and how companies across industries can benefit from advanced searches and robust record keeping.
Trend 1: Record Retention Laws Get More Stringent
The adoption of the CCPA is a watershed moment in the evolution of record retention laws. Not only will it grant customers greater freedom over the collection of personal data by companies, it has also paved the way for similar laws to be passed in other states.
If 2018 was the year of GDPR, 2021 was the year of CCPA. The revised California Consumer Privacy Act came into effect and became a game-changer for companies across industries.
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California Consumer Privacy Act Summary: How It Affects Your Business |
Under the new law, customers will have greater rights with respect to the type of information stored about them. Companies will now have to disclose personal data collected when customers request them, up to twice a year. In addition, customers will have the right to request that their data be deleted, as well as not sold to third parties.
The adoption of the CCPA is a watershed moment in the evolution of record retention laws. Not only will it grant customers greater freedom over the collection of personal data by companies, it has also paved the way for similar laws to be passed in other states.
A number of other states, including New York, Nevada, and Maryland have also started preparing and implementing similar record retention laws, forcing companies to rethink their enterprise data archiving strategies.
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What You Can Do to Get CCPA Ready |
With the advent of the personal data protection laws, in particular CCPA, companies will need to address an increasing number of personal data retrieval requests. It is likely to expect a surge in the number of customer inquiries to have their data deleted or retrieved.
This has far-reaching consequences.
First, companies will need to step up their efforts in facilitating quick data retrieval, especially the ones operating in regulated industries, such as K-12, healthcare, and finance, where the number of these requests will probably increase the most.
To be able to comply with the law and avoid penalties, companies should start navigating the increasingly stringent regulatory landscape, by setting up precise, data-driven archiving strategies.
“You need to have a clear document retention policy as well as a robust software to easily allow you to respond to data retrieval requests”.
Without a sound policy, companies will be making significant losses. Retrieving data is a costly process, especially without a good strategy to follow. Not only will manual retrieval take up your technical staff’s time, it will prevent them from tending to more business-critical tasks.
The only way to ensure full compliance, thus avoid fines and reputational risks, is to draw a policy and consistently apply it.
The next step is to find an archiving solution that will allow you to quickly and precisely retrieve large quantities of data and present them accordingly.
Trend 2: Social Media Archiving Becomes a Norm
In order to be successful, it is essential that organizations have a robust, two-faceted system that would include a social media retention strategy, as well as a reliable software to help implement it.
Social media will continue to permeate business operations, both inside the company and in interaction with customers. Businesses now readily use a variety of social networks to interact with customers and take stock of the market.
The popularity of social media for businesses is clear: they allow companies to collect feedback fast and communicate efficiently both inside and outside the organization’s perimeter.
In 2023, we can expect social media to be in even more widespread use. This will translate into a series of legal requirements that companies need to meet, both in terms of the scope and quantity.
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How Social Media Archiving Affects Your Business |
From a legal perspective, all the content generated on social media or through instant messaging apps, as well as calls, is now considered official business records. This means companies need to collect, preserve, archive, and retrieve when needed, the entirety of their social media content, in a variety of formats.
In the days of predominantly email communication, it was easy to anticipate the type of content that had to be archived. Today on the other hand, an average K-12 school or a healthcare institution need to capture and manage tweets, mentions, hashtags, posts, likes, links, audio, video, gifs, and more.
This poses significant challenges for compliance officers and IT staff in charge of social media retention policies within companies. Both the type and volume of content produced on social media have surged, and at a rate that is difficult to keep pace with.
In order to be successful, it is essential that organizations have a robust, two-faceted system that would include a social media retention strategy, as well as a reliable software to help implement it.
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Get Ready to Archive Social Media in 2023 |
To protect your organization from non-compliance, your social media archiving strategy needs to clearly define roles and responsibilities, the scope of archiving, retention periods, and draw up a step-by-step process on how to act when a new litigation or audit request is received.
Executing a sound social media archiving strategy means that organizations need a software that would help store all of social media content in an unalterable form, with timestamps, and thus keep companies fully aligned with social media retention laws.
With a good technical solution, companies can search large volumes of data and extract all business records relevant to the case, in a short time. While solutions like this can affect your budget, down the line this investment will prevent you from running afoul of record retention laws, the fines for which measure thousands of dollars.
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Records Retention Laws vs Data Privacy Laws: Compliance at a Crossroads? |
Records retention laws (keep everything for X years for compliance) are directly opposite to data privacy laws (don’t keep my personal info and remove it if I ask you to). Over the recent years, both regulatory areas have evolved to regulate social media content on a more extensive scale.
It goes without saying that going forward, companies will need to make sure they comply with both types of laws, otherwise they will be in breach. However, the stark contrast between two regulatory fields bears deep implications for the technical aspect of social media retention.
Companies that want to succeed need to find archiving technology that has the ability to remove personal data at the request, but still remain compliant with regulations on business records retention. We can therefore expect 2023 to be an industry-defining year as the CCPA comes into full effect.
Trend 3: Data Volumes Expand, Require Robust Software
“If one were able to store 175ZB onto BluRay discs, then you’d have a stack of discs that can get you to the moon 23 times.”
—David Reinsel, IDC Vice President
Our business inboxes get flooded with data every day, from notifications, to webinar invites, to business inquiries. We ourselves have witnessed that the quantity of data grows at a staggering rate, followed by a rise in communication channels.
Only a couple of years ago, email was the main communication channel for businesses. Today, we rely on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, IM, Whatsapp, Viber, and counting to get us our prospects and communicate with clients.
But according to data by IDC, we’re just getting started.
In a whitepaper published last year by Seagate and IDC, it was said that by 2025, the world datasphere (aka the sum collective of all data in the world) will grow 61% to reach the mind-boggling 175 Zettabytes. And around 30% of this data will require real-time processing. Meanwhile, Cisco says more traffic will be created in 2023 than in the first 32 years since the Internet started.
These figures mean that businesses across industries will need to get ready to capture and preserve the data.
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Facing Increasing Data Volume When Archiving Data |
As the hardware gets more powerful, so will software get more powerful. In turn, more and more opportunities for business communication will emerge.
This means that compliance teams and the IT sector will have their hands full when archiving enterprise data. It is safe to assume that most of this data will constitute official business records, thus will be subject to audit, litigation, and eDiscovery cases.
To keep up with the increasing volume of data that needs to be preserved in an unalterable, time-stamped format that cannot be destroyed (and it is likely that new file formats will continue to appear), tech and compliance teams will need to have robust business intelligence and knowledge management systems in place.
When it comes to data archiving, a strong technical solution is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have.
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Archiving Data in 2023: What to Look For |
To overcome the challenge of expanding data volumes, companies will need to find an archiving solution that can:
- capture, store, and retain large quantities of data. Whether you’re in finance, healthcare, or education, you need to offer infinite scalability. As data volumes continue up, companies will need to find a solution that can scale easily to support the storage requirements. Our experience shows that it’s better to think strategically for the long term, and thus adopt an archiving solution that can keep up with the pace of data growth.
- quickly process data stored in order to allow you to respond to litigation and audit requests timely. Given the increasingly diverse data formats, it will be essential to set up an archiver that can quickly browse through a variety of data formats and retrieve precise results. This way, you will maintain operational efficiency, without putting additional pressure on your compliance, legal, and IT teams.
- provide unparalleled security. As more and more information gets generated, it will be essential to offer unmatched security to your clients. By preserving personal data and business records, you will avoid regulatory penalties and fines, as well as reputation and data breach risks.
Trend 4: Advanced Searches Will Become a Necessity in Archiving Software
“66% of organizations rate the ability to perform advanced analytics on archived data as the 3rd most important capability”
—Data by IDC
In certain cases, such as small businesses or companies just starting out, advanced search may be perceived as a luxury, but in the year to come advanced search will become a necessity.
In 2023, businesses will continue to generate more and more business data that need to be retained for the duration of prescribed retention periods. All these data will be subject to regulatory requests, such as audit, litigation, or eDiscovery.
When this is considered in the context of regulatory acts such as the CCPA, it becomes clear that there is a higher chance that companies need to process and retrieve large quantities of data.
But it also becomes clear that there is a need to sift through terabytes of data in a short time. This can only be achieved through advanced searches.
Before you opt for a vendor that offers this functionality, do take into consideration the benefits. Only if you fully understand why you need an advanced search will you be able to implement it properly. Otherwise, you will be straining your budget without a good reason.
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Advanced Search in Practice |
To show why you should care to get on the advanced search bandwagon, let’s consider an eDiscovery request.
Your company gets a request to deliver information on a client who’s been taking legal action against the company for negligence. You will need to provide the entirety of information, scattered across servers, locations, and departments.
The more complex the case, the more data will be involved. The more data involved, the more time it will take. The more time it takes, the less time your IT staff and compliance officers have for other business operations. With a quick search, it can take hours to sift through the database and retrieve information, whereas an advanced search could do so in a lot less time.
But it’s not just the amount of time that advanced searches help with.
By relying on a set of functionalities such as keywords, date range, and roles, advanced searches will significantly narrow down the number of results. Essentially, you will be getting higher quality results, with more meaning for the eDiscovery case in less time.
If you apply this to all client and employee files, it becomes evident just how much savings you can make with advanced searches, both time and budget wise.
And the importance of advanced searches for the future of business has been recognized across the board.
According to data by TeleMessage and IDC, “66% of organizations rate ability to perform advanced analytics on archived data (big data initiatives) as the 3rd most important capability they consider when choosing an archiving solution – next to maintaining the original file name to the data for clients/applications and records retention.”
Trend 5: Cloud Archiving Solutions Take Central Stage
While the unlimited storage undoubtedly helps, it is not enough for efficient record management. Your cloud solution needs to support fast processing and retrieval, otherwise you will be left with an amount of data impossible to manage manually.
The large quantity of data generated both through social media and email will direct the archiving industry towards cloud-based development.
Hardware based solutions won’t suffice; instead, companies need to think for the future and upgrade to cloud archivers now.
It’s easy to see why the market has been moving in this direction: the biggest benefit of a cloud solution is its endless scalability.
“With a cloud based archiving solution, companies can capture and store a limitless amount of data, coming from a variety of channels and in numerous formats”.
But it’s worth remembering that while the unlimited storage undoubtedly helps, it is not enough for efficient record management. Your cloud solution needs to support fast processing and retrieval, otherwise you will be left with an amount of data impossible to manage manually.
In the context of cloud archiving solution, it is worth reflecting on legal and compliance teams that deal with the bulk of requests. According to data by Exterro, legal hold, preservation and collection are the least outsourced activities. Meanwhile, eDiscovery and data collection are reportedly the most widespread technologies.
Other industry reports suggest that more and more legal teams are embracing technology, and going into 2023, this trend will likely continue. Hence when choosing a vendor for your archiving purposes, you should consult your legal teams first.
Conclusion
It is clear that companies have a challenging set of tasks come 2023. First, they need to ensure continued compliance with seemingly opposing laws. Then, they need to put the vast amount of data from various sources and formats under control, in order to meet regulatory requirements, avoid fines, ensure untarnished reputation and push the business forward.
Companies that want to be successful will need to employ a suite of advanced archiving functionalities, including searches, unlimited storage, easy retrieval, and real-time processing, while keeping abreast with the latest regulatory changes and trends.
To find out how we can help you leverage your archiving solution as a business intelligence resource, contact us or schedule a personal demo.
