Thank you Allen.  Your email intrigues me and I'll ask more questions than
offer answers.

Sorry, I am a SNIA person (but an end-user of storage rather than a vendor)
and I would be grateful for more information on a point that you raise
namely: "Would that not invite retention of records for excessive periods of
time, with the attendand risks associated with potential litigation, etc.?"

Isn't there a basic premise in business that businesses take on risks in
order to achieve profit?   If I take forward an IT proposal and say "If you
don't spend this money then we will be at risk" the next most natural
question is: "Can you quantify that risk?"  With Disaster Recovery and
Business Continuity spending most of the budget is based on risk analysis.
We know that we will lose servers and backup software should cover that
certainty.  We know that we may have a power outage and the cost of running
with on two separate power grids and diesel generators can be justified if
these cost less than the expected business outage and the expected frequency
of outage.  I take it as a given that risk is unavoidable.  Mind you I don't
propose that this be extended to include the risk of being caught.
Following legal requirements shoudl be a given.

Is there an alternate path by which a business might elect to take on
insurance to cover the liability risk of retaining a record for longer than
necessary?  This might, in the end, be cheaper then daily operations costs
for an IT infrastructure to support what seems like a limitless number of
buckets for electronic data.

I can devise storage architectures to support buckets and the fewer that I
have the cheaper the operational cost will be to support the
infrastructure.  Everything within the bucket would expire on its appointed
day but it might be saved for months more than necessary if I elected to
create  "year-based buckets" of say 1-year, 2-year, 7-year, 25-year, etc.

Content management is complex no matter how you tackle it but can't it be
separated from retention-cycles somewhat?.  Wouldn't the retention cycle be
part of the same meta-data that we'll need for content management?

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