Peer to Peer Magazine

26 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2018 The Cloud's Five Critical Data Management Gaps FEATURES access model and there is yet more work to prevent it from being overly burdensome and otherwise ensure its successful adoption. Firms require the ability to selectively secure and delegate access controls over clients, maers, folders and even individual documents to very precise groups or classes of users. This does not change when going cloud. Without an automated mechanism in place to enable that policy and process, firms face adoption and scalability challenges. Gap 3: Business Continuity Outages can impact cloud providers' soware, data centers and communication links; they are all prone to problems or failures. The threat of cyberthreat or corruption, destruction or unavailability of data remains and firms need to plan appropriately. The inability to access critical content for even one hour can result in losses measured in the thousands or even millions of dollars. An advantage of moving to the cloud is the significant reduction in capital investment in storage. Enterprise-class storage comes with an enterprise- class price tag. Bringing a copy of that same data back in-house for business continuity purposes would require a firm to make – and continue making – capital investments in hardware, defeating one of the more significant benefits of moving to the cloud in the first place. Moreover, doing so typically delivers a mere collection of files with no key metadata and no rapid access in the event of disaster or outage. Hardly the most robust option. The ideal solution here is for firms to maintain a full, mirrored copy of their live content in the cloud. By mirroring data (and its associated metadata) to a second, robust cloud provider, firms can significantly mitigate risk, ensuring the ability to access client data even in the event of an outage of their primary provider. Done properly, content would be securely accessible for end users through an intuitive search interface, enabling them to readily locate and access client files. Gap 4: Moving Content Between Systems Moving content between cloud systems is increasingly critical. We need content to move fluidly between key systems such as the DMS, extranet, deal room, etc. to service various audiences. This necessitates a centralized function automating integrity and fluidity as the content moves between systems, a function able to capture and transfer all key metadata including client and maer names, document IDs, author, operator and more. This centralized function should also preserve document, folder and maer security seings to ensure fluidity and integrity. For firms trying to relieve themselves of the burden of managing more on-premise storage, the initial content migration projects can also be complex, even when moving from a DMS provider's on-premise solution to its own hosted environment. Firms can ensure a smooth transition to hosted DMS platforms by providing a differential synchronization feature that ensures they capture all changes to their existing, on-premise platform during the migration project. This simplifies the application of those changes to the new, hosted platform, ensuring a smooth and seamless transition for the providers' technical team. For firms trying to relieve themselves of the burden of managing more on-premise storage, the initial content migration projects can also be complex, even when moving from a DMS provider's on- premise solution to its own hosted environment.

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