If one looks at the tremendous volume of players in the Cloud stratosphere, and consider how history works in records management, we are only a few years from these various Clouds being acquired or worse yet failing and taking their data contents with them.  You scoff…..?

In the current Industry, the offsite storage industry has been bought up by investors and Mega Centers.

Look at the trends that caused that:
1) Permanent removal fees of reasonable size exploding to true Hostage Fees. 
2) It became cheaper to buy an entire offsite vendor than to win the business by paying off the previous Hostage Fees.
3) The Industry collapses from 1,000 service providers nationally to less than 300 now. 
4) The Mega’s bought companies their clients migrated to when they saw service decline while Hostage Fees climbed to unforeseen heights. Ironically, the records manager is funding the demise of his own vendor network.
5) The Shredding Industry grew from a gangly teenager into the roaring Hulk.

How did corporations and records managers react:
1) Corporations shredded boxes at an aggressive rate.
2) Corporations seeing the cost saving pressured records managers to shorten retention schedules wherever possible.[Not since the roving ice cream trucks with their jingling chimes, has a client group look so forward to the arrival of a truck in the neighborhood!]
3) The life of a box on a shelf dropped from an average of 16 years to now less than 10 and moving to 7 across the board. C-Level are pushing for 3 years for hard copy at most.
4) Shredding has grown from 250 players to over 1,000.  It is almost mathematical the reversal of fortunes.
5) The Cloud became ubiquitous and there are hundreds and hundreds of vendors; and, of course the Mega Players of the computer hardware manufacturers lead the pack offering a range of products. Management thinks for now it has control of their records with delete keys, encryption and the avoidance of Hostage Fees.
6) The back up tapes for business continuity are moving to vaults or safes where management controls them and security is written into the Disaster Recovery Plan.

As with all ice bergs, the largest danger lays beneath the surface. What does the future hold?

What clarion call should records management provide to the Industry?

Clouds are notorious for the breaches.  The collection of vast amounts of records is a prize worth hacking. Yet security has been slow to evolve here.

Cyber security is hard to achieve with so many different Clouds.

NAID cleaned up the loss of paper records in dumpsters and other exposures by providing a Certified Security Plan for shredding documents securely with certificates of destruction, inspected shredding firms and professional codes.

This has not evolved for the Cloud.  Can records managers and information governance impose security on the Cloud?  I doubt it?

How does the information governance side of records management build security into their platform?

How do we protect ourselves from government controlled hackers? The Stuxnet cyber attack perpetrated to attack Iran’s  uranium enrichment, or the Chinese hack of our critical defense systems. And then there are the attacks that are created by hackers with a desire for the excitement of the hack, or looking for the big score: Conficker botnets that continually updates itself to make it impossible to eliminate, TJ MAXX and the IRS and Homeland Security, Sony and Playstation, and on to the fastest spreading Melissa virus.

Will records management guide corporations to keep the most secure of files offline and within secure environments. After all, making it tedious to steal information has worked for centuries. 

I think past is prologue so looking at what has happened in the last 40 years provides some guidance for the next 10 years. 

I find it unusual that we do not have in-depth discussions of how our companies are heading.  Some big icebergs are out there in the Cloud.  The consolidations will be coming soon.  Will records management let the corporations be caught up in Hostage Fees to move out of an unsafe Cloud to one that is better prepared? Will Cloud hostage fees arise? Will tape storage for back-up and organization security move to the records manager or information governance side.

We are at a key moment. Electronic Records is now recognized by everyone. IT specifically does not want to manage the electronic records. Will records managers grab the wheel? These are not rhetorical questions!  We should see if we can answer them as a body.

If you had an unlimited budget and autonomous control, what would your plan be?


Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
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(610)  756-4440    Fax (610)  756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM


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