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Turls
Level 6
Understanding the Components of Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise content management (ECM) systems present a unique data protection challenge within enterprise-wide backup and recovery practices. ECM systems such as EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet P8 and Open Text Livelink are intended to help companies more easily manipulate and leverage vast amounts of complex data types. An ECM system dynamically creates and manages the entire content lifecycle along with its associated metadata, which is comprised of audit trails, approvals, revisions, annotation, alternate formats and custom attributes, among other properties. This complex information record is often referred to as an Object within the ECM community.

ECM systems are uniquely architected to house a content repository with folders and documents, while the related metadata resides separately in a database. The application architecture itself monitors and maintains the  relationships between content and its metadata to ensure overall data integrity, but only as long as the application itself remains intact and synchronized.

The Importance of Metadata

Metadata is defined as “data about data.” One of the core values of an ECM system is its ability to maintain extensive amounts of complex metadata about the various documents it manages - data that can be just as crucial as the documents themselves. This is especially true as companies strive to comply with the various regulations that are specific to the preservation and recoverability of authentic metadata, including but not exclusive to the  Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 for all public companies, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) and Environment Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) policies for the financial services industry, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for the healthcare industry.

Additionally, within eDiscovery the ability to accurately recover metadata is just as important—if not more so—than the ability to recover business applications and documents. For example, consider the Discovery Rules Amendment of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, effective December 1, 2006, which stipulates that companies involved with litigation must, by default, not only produce all requested documents and e-mail in their normally used electronic state regardless of the complexity of the information, but also produce the accompanying unaltered electronic audit trail. This requirement now eliminates an organization’s ability to pay a minimal fine for the failure to produce complex objects within litigation or inspections.

Beyond the compliance and regulatory issues, however, are efficiency requirements for ECM systems. Primary business drivers behind the implementation of these systems are to gain efficiencies within business processes and to improve fiscal performance. Application failures and user mishandling that result in lost metadata will put those efficiency goals in jeopardy. If a company’s only option is to roll back its ECM system to the last known good backup, it will lose all the work that employees generated after that point in time. In addition, the company loses significant worker productivity and the ability to process transactions while the ECM system is unavailable. Just in the Life Sciences industry alone, it’s anticipated that for every day an ECM application is offline, there’s a daily cost to the organization of $1 million due to lost productivity, halted test process cycles and delayed market availability of products(1).

To read the complete article, please download the PDF.

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Last update:
‎01-04-2010 11:04 AM
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