The issue of legacy data is a real challenge for many organizations. Legacy data must be made available to the organization and it must also be discoverable. Data quality and data cleansing need to ensure the integrity of information. Migrating unstructured content can be a laborious and costly activity. Not a formal building block in our Smart Content Framework™, migration of unstructured content is a less used component of information governance.
The challenge is that documents can exist in multiple places at the same time, different revisions of the same document exist, some documents should be deleted, and others should be archived. There may be records that were never declared, as well as confidential or privacy information that will not be identified when migrated. All of these challenges make migration of unstructured content a process that requires thought and careful planning.
The ideal solution is to combine workflow capabilities and enable intelligent automatic classification decisions during and after migration. These decisions enhance organizational performance and drive down costs, but more importantly enforce corporate and legal compliance guidelines.
To migrate document collections effectively you need to search the text content of each document to determine its value. This classification must be done before you can make an intelligent decision about how to relocate items during the migration process. This cannot be done manually as the volume is too high, and the consistency will undoubtedly be poor.
Security after the Migration Process
Migration must also consider the security of the documents as they are moved to their new location. There are two imperatives here; first, to respect the existing security status and apply the same security in the new location and second, to identify sensitive documents that may not currently be in a secure location. Assessing the security needs of these documents requires intelligent interrogation of their content, and then comparison to a number of relevant official taxonomies – PII, PHI, ITAR etc. If a document is automatically classified against one or more of these taxonomies, it must be given the appropriate security profile.
General migration tools cannot safeguard document confidentiality because they do not make intelligent taxonomy workflow decisions based on the text content of the document. If this security profiling is not performed during migration, then many of these documents will be easy to surface using enterprise search, breaching the relevant document security obligations. Using conceptTaxonomyWorkflow, these documents will be safely routed to the record application, or some other appropriate secure location with the correct access rights, protecting and preserving documents during the migration process. Information governance best practices should be applied to the migration of unstructured content. This also provides organizations with a highly effective way to clean up the irrelevant or unnecessary documents, as well as to identify records that may not been declared or have potential privacy exposures.
There is no sense in migrating documents that no longer contain value, or perhaps more importantly, that should have been declared records, or contain sensitive information. According to studies, over 60% of content is obsolete. I vote for migrating the right way, the first time.
What do you think?
