Should Your Bucket Have Holes in It?
Part 2 – Plugging the Holes
John Montaña
Montaña & Associates
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The Tension
You want as few buckets as possible
Legal requirements or other considerations will force more buckets on you
System configuration limitations may limit your ability to accommodate this tension
You may find that you’re stuck with sub-optimal strategies
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Some Well-Known Issues:
You’re likely to have at least a few of these
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System Architecture Inconsistent with Legal Requirements
System locations conflict with privacy or location laws
Data silos within systems result in very long retention periods
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Data Growth
Big buckets = long retention periods = geometric growth of data sets
Over time the IT budget is blown away by growth in storage costs
Downstream costs (e.g., discovery) grow proportionally
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That Big Ol’ Pile of Paper
Big buckets = long retention = big storage bill
Over time the box storage budget is blown away by growth
Downstream costs (e.g., discovery) grow proportionally
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Retention Schedule as Index and Finding Aid
Bigger Buckets = less information about their contents
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Long-term Business NeedsTrending – Data Mining
Often focused on very granular data sets
Often restricted to very occasional use
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Different Growth Rates in the Data Set
The big bucket works for most of its contents
One silo within it grows much more quickly than the rest
The conservative retention period drives up storage costs massively
The silo driving costs doesn’t require a long retention period
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System Architecture, Case 1.Servers in the Wrong Country
Lots of countries have rules about where you can keep records
Many forbid keeping data outside the country Tax and accounting PII PHI PCI
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What to Do?
Country-based exception and technology re-configuration
Duplicate electronic copies in-country
Paper is still legal everywhere – maybe you use it
Any way, you’ve just created a new bucket
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System Architecture, Case 2.That Doggone Salesman in Russia
75 year retention of payroll records
Permanent retention of many other accounting, personnel and other records records
Putin gets to look in your computer system
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Paper v. Electronic
Many electronic systems REQUIRE big buckets It’s big buckets or no buckets
Well-organized paper systems can be managed on a granular basis Small buckets with shorter retention periods
Can you have a granular paper-based schedule with shorter retention periods, and a big-bucket schedule for e-records with longer ones?
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Sure!
Both must comply with legal requirements
Both must be regular course of business, etc. etc.
Understand the downside issues: Discovery Explaining why you have two schedules Administrative overhead
If the cost-benefit equation justifies it, ther is no reason it can’t be done
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Trending and Data Mining
They think they need everything They don’t
They think they need it all for a very long period of time They don’t
They want a massive dataset retained forever, regardless of cost They can’t have it
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Negotiate!
The longer they need it, the less they can have
The really long-term stuff needs to be in it’s own silo with that long retention period
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Bottom Line
Big buckets have the inherent downside of long retention periods
Choosing buckets poorly can aggravate this problem badly
Failure to understand the data that has the potential to aggravate the problem is key
When possible, buckets must be carved to avoid these data types
That data winds up in separate buckets
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QuestionsQuestions
??
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