Published May 2021
Sponsored by Veritas and Zix
Executive Summary
Organizations generate large volumes of electronic data, most of it unstructured. Content-generating sources include email, text messaging, telephony, collaboration systems like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, desktop productivity applications, CRM systems, social media and a wide range of other tools and capabilities.
Much of the content generated by an organization constitutes some form of business record: invoices, policy statements, client files, communications with members of a supply chain, orders, prospect inquiries, employee records, and the like. Organizations are obligated to retain these business records for varying lengths of time and for a variety of reasons: regulatory obligations, legal requirements, or best practice considerations.
Retaining records can be accomplished with simple backup, but this is an inefficient method of records retention that is fraught with problems: it normally retains an incomplete set of business records, data can easily be deleted or modified, and searching for and producing data is difficult, time-consuming and risky.
Organizations should deploy an archiving solution instead of relying on backup.
