That is a really good piece David. I think the critical piece for records managers and risk managers is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as IT only wants to talk about the next investment to achieve a goal.  But in three years they come back showing that system is now obsolete.

If the records manager can point out the part of the Total Cost of Ownership that is affected by an ineffective ability to provide a Data Map in the 99 day window, the legal costs of preparing a digital defense initiative. Filling a room with lawyers and IT people and trying to prepare a defense to a Plaintiff’s litigation is astronomical.

Putting everything in the Cloud is a sellable model. Trying to pull it all out of the Cloud and being able to prove that it is all there is not. “Are you sure this is everything counselor?”  And every conversion of hardware and software is a nightmare.

TCO when considering legal costs, consultants, lost management time preparing the appropriate data map, stress on staff and loss of image when it appears you are not managing things properly or are hiding records. The error rate on online storage compared to back up tapes is vastly higher, the cost of the storage is 10 times higher to maintain in an online platform. These points seem to be left out of the analysis when IT performs the TCO listing.

On Jul 31, 2013, at 12:01 AM, RECMGMT-L automatic digest system wrote:

> Subject: Article on the economics of long term digital storage
> 
> 
> http://www.lockss.org/locksswp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/unesco2012.pdf
> 
> The authors reach the following conclusions:
> 
> 
> 1.      Economic sustainability presents the major challenge for long term digital storage. Paper survives benign neglect fairly well while digital information does not
> 
> 2.      The rapid decline in cost per bit of storage will slow and may actually stop
> 
> 3.      Long term cost of digital storage will become more difficult to predict
> 
> 4.      The importance of developing improved digital storage cost models will grow
> 
> 5.      For much of this decade tape is likely to improve its existing cost advantage over disk
> 
> 6.      Improved cost models that properly recognize long term total cost of ownership (with respect to digital storage) will allow organizations to better exploit current low interest rates. Investment in solid state technologies, which despite their high capital costs, are for this decade likely to provide lower total cost of ownership than disk while retaining rapid access
> 
> 7.      The pricing models of current commercial cloud storage services are not suitable for long-term storage
> 
> 
> David B. Gaynon, CRM


Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
[log in to unmask]
(610)  756-4440    Fax (610)  756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM


List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message.
mailto:[log in to unmask]