Bluesource’s EV and EDP 247 Offering – Data Management in the Cloud Gives Government an Edge
Data Management in the cloud gives government an edge. Data is growing at an exponential rate not just in the private sector but also within the government. Data is growing at a faster rate than ever. In the decade between 2010 and 2020, data interactions increased by 5000%. By 2025, global data storage is projected to exceed 200 zettabytes.
As the data is growing, so are data regulations and compliance. Organizations are finding it more difficult to know what data to keep and what to delete.
The Federal Government started the process of data management by responding to the Managing Government Records Directive in 2012. As part of this directive, agencies have had to take to the path of digitizing their temporary and permanent records in order to meet the benchmarks and ultimate deadline of managing all electronic records in electronic format by the end of 2019. According to the most recent Records Management Self-Assessment 2015 (RMSA) report from NARA, the majority of agencies (80%) indicated that their agency leadership recognizes records and information management as a priority but 36% of agencies scored in the low-risk category, 47% in the moderate risk, and 17% in the high risk. That leaves 64% of agencies with much higher risks of breaches, misinformation, lost records, etc., than they should have.
Rather than trying to manage all the data with internal hardware, leveraging applications in the cloud allows government organizations to not only increase collaboration but also reduce costs. More importantly, it takes away significant capital infrastructure costs and the ongoing effort to continuously refresh or update the acquired hardware or software. The primary inhibitor to cloud adoption for government agencies is the potential security risk. To mitigate that risk, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has created “a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.” This allows for the adoption of secure cloud solutions throughout the Federal Government because vendors who comply with FedRAMP are creating a secure environment for the federal agencies to access business-critical applications.
As federal agencies gain control of their data, strategies for information governance become more significant in defining access and management of data for different workflows. One of these critical workflows for federal agencies is eDiscovery. eDiscovery plays an integral role in identifying specific information from a smaller set of data, say just millions of documents (and not billions) and allows agencies to take specific action on that information. With data growing at 40% year over year, it’s going to get increasingly difficult to decipher relevant data from irrelevant, especially if only human reviewers are used to make that distinction. Artificial learning reduces the amount of work for human reviewers to make important decisions regarding the relevancy of a particular document.
One of the first solutions on the market that cut through the fog was the Veritas eDiscovery Platform through its use of Transparent Predictive Coding. Veritas is now offering an end-to-end eDiscovery platform available as a FedRAMP Authorized Moderate impact cloud service provided by Veritas’ platinum-certified partner, bluesource and their partner, ProjectHost.
Having access to eDiscovery on a secure cloud provides increased productivity and offers cost benefits to government agencies because there can be a greater focus on mission critical applications vs the physical maintenance, security, and continuous backup of data on multiple servers. It allows for moving beyond manual and time-consuming discovery approaches for making decisions about data. Instead, utilizing technology to do the heavy lifting allows government organizations to meet regulatory compliance, improve eDiscovery practices and drive more effective decisions from greater productivity.