Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Steve Markey. Published: 2012-05-29 05:00:01Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. This past week I was at the Business of the Cloud conference in Dallas, TX and sat next to Adam Swidler, a senior manager at Google. He went on to educate me about Google Vault and their retention functionality.
And, as I sat there playing around on my iPad with this new service (an improvement from their previous Google Message Discovery offering), it hit me. Cloud service providers (CSPs) are drinking the information governance Kool-Aid!
Shortly after that session we adjourned to a mixer where I went on to discuss this offering with an attorney, as well as the path that CSPs are generally taking from an information governance perspective. The no brainer here is that CSPs understand the legal ramifications of data retention for their customers and they are responding in kind with additional functionality. Another example here is Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their Simple Storage Service (S3), which now offers the ability to implement retention policies.
So, as two of the more prevalent CSPs are now offering services with built-in information governance functionality, the question is when is everyone else going to join in?
My prediction and hope is that we will see more of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) CSPs (e.g. Salesforce.com, 37Signals, Zoho) offer this functionality sooner rather than later. From there we will see infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and storage-as-a-service (STaaS) CSPs come on board, then the database-as-a-service (DBaaS) providers will join as well. Retention and other information governance requirements are here to stay for CSPs and that is a significant win for both the legal, eDiscovery and information management community. Please comment below and give us your feedback.
eDiscoveryJournal Contributor – Steven Markey