Venyu Blog

Not to get all Stephen Hawking on you, but the law of conservation of energy states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed from one state to another.

I think it’s safe to say that the same goes for data. No matter how it came into being or how many times you hit the delete button or how you wish you could just erase that Internet-posted photo of you at that party with an adult beverage in your hand that’s neither in the context of raising it in toast to a professional colleague or in honor of the new bride and groom, data is forever.

Not even the Grim Reaper will wipe the slate clean and there’s even one company MyWebWill –which I profiled way back in February 2010 in my post “Blogging in the Afterlife?” – who knows data is held in perpetuity. The Sweden-based web service, triggered upon receipt of an email from one of two persons you designate informs MyWebWill of your passing and provides evidence of such (e.g. death certificate), deactivates and erases your online accounts for the modest fee of $17 a year and a one-time charge of $179.

So, ok, you’re saying what’s triggered this fascination with the eternal data graveyard? It’s actually an incisive, well-written post by Jim McGann in a recent posting in Forbes Magazine, “Lesson From The News Of The World Scandal: Data Is Forever.

Detailing the hard lessons from the recent scandal surrounding The News of the World where no matter how hard the principals in the publication tried to expunge the record of their crimes and misdemeanors — including the allegation of phone-tapping the widows of 911 victims here in the USA — the data remained, a virtual audit trail that anyone with half a wit or simply the inclination to find and punish the guilty could possibly ignore. And yes, it’s proof that whether data is held on-site or in the cloud or on a tape drive secreted somewhere you’ll never be able to access very quickly (in other words, when you really need it), the law’s lengthy litigation ligature is a noose you’re unlikely to escape, at least not for very long.

McGann builds his case from three simple lessons associated with this scandal and I submit to you that taken individually or collectively these are business and life lessons that should be examined and thoughtfully considered if you are “in” the business of data archiving in any shape, manner or form. These include: one, we are all data-makers tapping away on data collecting devices; two, you can expunge the data-maker and devices, but never the data. And three, data may age, but does not go away.

 Consider, as McGann does:

“Corporate data is not fragile.  Deleting an email, shredding a hard drive, even decommissioning an entire email server does not purge corporate data. As quickly as employees create content, corporate technology teams are making copies – for disaster recovery, for instance. If an organization is faced with a disaster such as a flood or a fire, these copies can quickly be restored and the business will not miss a beat. Organizations that claim that the data has been purged don’t realize that what they purged was only one of the copies and that many, many others exist. Redundancy is at the core of these disaster recovery procedures deployed by the technology teams in every public corporation. It is a process that runs every day and will make a copy of every new file and email created by every employee: If something happens to your PC, all data can easily be restored. The data, like the beat, goes on.”

McGann properly suggests that deleting files and email and even shredding PC hard drives is the answer since as soon as data in created it becomes secured by the information technology teams through redundant copies. In other words, using the delete key to eliminate “sensitive content” is utterly and thoroughly pointless because, like the catch-all crane found in a car junkyard, all you’re really doing is moving said car from one part of the yard to another, albeit in smaller and smaller components.

McGann sees The News of the World scandal as a clarion call for enterprises to understand the nature of data and that deleting (or conversely preserving it, especially in the face of legal challenges and subpoenas), should be the domain of legal and records management professionals, or as he suggests, those who are charged with protecting the company from any liability (e.g. corporate governance)

I found it particularly ironic that in the case of this scandal, backup tapes may be the only available source of reliable content (the ‘hacking’ emails in question date from 2005). Though in the past backup tapes have been difficult to access as they age as the software that was used to make them is retired but since disaster recovery is designed, per McGann, to restore content as needed, those emails are safely stored and now readily available on backup tapes – backup tapes, asserts McGann, that are a snapshot of the business from time gone by.

The upshot for McGann and for professionals in our industry is that every organization creating consuming and ultimately archiving data must do so with the understanding that – like matter itself – it cannot be destroyed, only changed into something else. It is that “something else” that, as McGann suggests in his last sentence of the post that it is the most telling: “Left unchecked, there is vast and exponentially increasing amount of data created daily — and if you don’t have power over it, it has power over you.”

I’m reminded here by the French writer Voltaire who, in 1700’s France originated the phrase: (sorry Stan Lee), “With great power comes great responsibility.” If you are a custodian of data, whatever its form, the hard truth is that it is perpetual and backup, recovery and archiving (ideally in the cloud) still represents your company’s best chance to exonerate itself (or, conversely), implicate its reputation and conduct when the law, personified infamously and most currently by The News of the World scandal, comes calling.