"Making data easily accessible is a major need"
Jan 25, 2008

Data, data and more data, that's what all enterprises have to deal with every single day. Anil Chakravarthy, VP, (India technical operations) of Symantec India, talks to CXOtoday Staff about the challenges of data management and the need for an efficient data management solution in today's business environment.

What are the challenges in the area of data management & retrieval?

There is a vast generation of data everyday. As data gets generated it also gets converted into useful information. Simultaneously, there are issues arising in the context of managing, storing and retrieving this data. There are also many regulations being put in place to control and protect this sensitive data. This current scenario has raised the challenges in managing and retrieving data. The commonly faced challenges can be categorized as:

* Appropriately archiving data while it is still allowing it to be readily accessible.

* The need for fast, effective, easy, data encryption. There is an ever-increasing need to be able to perform this type of data encryption and also have the ability to protect and test data used for program/business case testing.

* The ability to perform data change analysis is also an ongoing requirement and it is also becoming more complex as the new regulations come into play. To monitor a company's own IT staff has also taken on new priority.

What is the need of an archiving solution in today's business scenario?

Enterprise Security Group research estimates that organizations will archive over 57,000 petabytes of e-mails, files and database data over the next 4 years. These digital assets may no longer be needed for current business operations, but are intentionally retained to satisfy records management, litigation support, data management, regulatory compliance, or corporate governance requirements. The benefits of archiving are:

* Archiving helps in offloading historical data from production resources.

* Archiving enhances application and associated supporting infrastructure performance to reduce the time it takes for in-house counsel to retrieve electronic evidence in response to a discovery request.

As more information is archived, additional storage capacity must be deployed. This further adds to the management of storage capacity.

Customers prefer to deploy universal archiving solutions for a variety of reasons.

What are Symantec's offerings for enterprises in the data management space?

In order to mitigate and control the amount of data archived, Symantec has Enterprise Vault that adds 'Single Instance Storage' features to its archive solutions. This improves the archive processes by storing one copy of a message or file, while tracking all the attributes and references associated with any duplicate content.

The benefit for customers is their ability to store less data and improve their control over their asset information.

During the archiving process, Enterprise Vault analyzes every aspect of the content, including message header, message attachment, file creator, and other data attributes. If Enterprise Vault recognizes that the same content has been previously archived within a partition, it will create a reference pointer between the application and the file already stored in the repository. The pointer eliminates the need to store the same file twice. The Single Instance Storage analysis is performed on a partition-by-partition basis, enabling Symantec customers to reduce the size of each repository that enforces unique archival policies.

Could you give us details about recent initiatives to upgrade this solution?

Symantec announced a comprehensive e-Discovery initiative that includes two new E-Discovery Connectors and supporting services for users of Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator. The Symantec E-Discovery Review Collector and E-Discovery Collection Connector provide tight integration between EV Discovery Accelerator and third-party case management, review, analytics, forensics and desktop collection tools to automate evidence collection and transfer. This supports proper chain of custody and standards set by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). EDRM Project was created to address the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market.

What are Symantec's future plans and strategy in archiving space?

Enterprise Vault is a significant area for us and we are continuously working on enhancing the products capabilities.

We are looking at broadening our domain beyond e-mail and IM to support file formats from verticals, such as healthcare and engineering. For instance, Indian hospitals that have subsidiaries overseas have to be HIPAA and/or SOX compliant in order to do business in countries abroad. A regulatory requirement for storing, with the capability to retrieve, patient records for 20 years can be addressed only through high-end technology. These technological advances are critical for hospitals to stay competitive.

In order to address such challenges we are working on a project called XML Ingestion for Enterprise Vault. It is aimed at enabling Enterprise Vault to archive and index a variety of popular file formats like intelligent archiving and retrieval of voice files. This is an important area for compliance. Further indexing documents and metadata for arbitrary file formats will be enabled via this project.