Enterprise Content Management: Choosing the Right Data Privacy Software, Part 2

Today, an enterprise thrives on content, and if it’s in financial services or another heavily regulated sector? Collecting, curating, and properly disposing of that content is mission-critical.  But every day, a company is generating more of it. A lot more. That’s where Enterprise Content Management comes in.

The average amount of corporate data managed soared from 1.45 petabytes in 2015 to 9.70 PB in 2018, each petabyte consisting of 1,000 terabytes of data.  Now more than ever, businesses need the ability to easily and quickly manage, access, and report on the head-spinning amount of data they have on hand, particularly in those highly regulated sectors we just mentioned.

The problem? Critical data is often stored across a wide range of silos: business applications, spreadsheets, word documents, SMS messages, scanned documents, reports, emails, faxes, photographs, statements, text files and more. This fragmentation creates headaches and inefficiency for employees: According to IDC, a knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information.

But the right Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution can provide a single source of truth for all content used throughout an organization.

Enterprise Content Management can simplify content discovery and control access

An Enterprise Content Management solution simplifies content discovery for employees, while providing flexible and appropriate levels of access. By creating a single secure source of truth for vital and sensitive content, you’re making it easy for staff anywhere in the enterprise to locate the most up-to-date and approved document, data asset, or other resource available.

On the other hand, an ECM allows you to limit access to those documents.  As every good CIO or CISO knows, the primary source of risk for a company comes from its own employees.  They can be guilty of a pretty broad spectrum of bad behaviors, negligence, or inadvertent error.  Having a tool for gathering, securing, and then policing access to important content becomes mandatory for any company where the slightest breach or misuse of it can have serious competitive or regulatory repercussions.

What should an ECM deliver?

When considering an Enterprise Content Management software solution, you’ll need to know that the product you’re looking at can:

• Provide an ample, secure data repository that’s accessible to users immediately, whenever they require it.
• Solve the information dilemma confronting enterprises managing large amounts of sensitive data, thanks to records management features for storing, preserving, and automatically deleting that data in compliance with legal and regulatory guidelines.
• Handle huge amounts of data every hour of every day, automatically storing it for 24/7 retrieval.
• Let users easily implement compliance essentials like audit trails, access restrictions, and retention policies.
• Improve efficiency and productivity by streamlining business processes, cutting execution time, and eliminating human error.
• Mine vast amounts of data from countless documents, applying multiple ranges and parameters to find exact results.

Businesses that were born in the digital age may have a leg up in their industry when building the architecture for an Enterprise Content Management solution.  But if you’re an organization that’s been using technology for decades, you’ll want a cost-effective solution that can layer over legacy systems with support for different search needs.

Be sure to analyze the search and discovery capabilities of the ECMs you’re evaluating. Remember, data has no intrinsic value, just the value it provides when properly analyzed to draw out insights and intelligence.

Read Part I: Policy Management

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