Infotechtion is Proud to Announce a Partnership with Preservica to automate digital preservation in Microsoft 365 Infotechtion is proud to announce its partnership with Preservica, leaders in Active Digital Preservation archiving, to support implementation of Preservica’s new product launching in 2023 – Preserve365™. This product seamlessly embeds Preservica’s Active Digital Preservation archiving within the Microsoft 365 experience to protecthigh-value, long-term records.This work directly aligns with Infotechtion’s efforts to help clients transition to modern, automated information governance standards in Microsoft 365.
• tackle your ever-growing backlog,
• free up your staff to work on other critical projects,
• reduce your IT maintenance budget, and
• ensure that critical content is easily found and usable in the future – 10, 20, and 30 years from now.
Gareth Aitken, Vice President of Preservica Commercial Strategy This week, we welcome Gareth Aitken, Vice President of Preservica Commercial Strategy, to talk to us about why it is so important to use automation within the Microsoft365 environment to get ahead of your organization’s information tsunami and protect your long-term, high-value content.
Part 1: Protecting your most valuable long-term records
There are billions of people using Windows in some form, either at home or in businesses, and more than a million businesses use Microsoft 365. For example, in April 2020 there were approximately 75 million monthly active Teams users. One year later, the community had increased to 145 million. By January 2022 that had grown further, to 270 million, representing a transformational change in the way businesses operate. Chances are, you’re using Microsoft 365 today or your organization is considering adoption in the near future. But it’s not just the adoption of these tools that’s growing. The volume of records being generated in Microsoft 365 is massive, with some estimates pointing to more than a billion new documents being created every day. And the volume will only continue to grow in a virtual tsunami of information.
So, how are most organizations managing this influx of information? How are they identifying and dealing with high-value, long-term content? The Preservica and MER survey mentioned above also found that 88% of organizations manage their records (that massive volume of content) and the classification processes manually. The community has articulated this is a clear challenge – the manual workflow is inefficient, unsustainable, and introduces a number ofcompliance risks. To develop a strategy to best manage this content, it’s important to understand the risks.
Understanding the risks for your long-term, high-value content
Digital information is fragile and long-term use requires particular care. The longer a document must be kept, the greater the threat that the content won’t be readable. Technology refresh cycles happen more and more frequently. As systems are replaced and file formats expire, the information inside – the most important asset – becomes at risk. A great example is Lotus Notes, ground-breaking email technology from IBM, which is obsolete and can no longer be viewed today.
It is these digital records that are most at risk. To ensure that digital formats and the information they support is readable when required well into the future, long-term digital preservation technology – an automated way of maintaining the integrity of the digital data over time, as well as converting it to new formats as necessary to keep it readable – should also be part of a comprehensive Information Governance strategy. The importance of digital preservation Digital preservation aims to protect critical information over its required lifetime, independent of file foThe key components of a digital preservation strategy should include integrating data siloes, decoupling data from its hardware medium, identifying ownership, creating complete metadata to identify each record, and preventing data from becoming corrupted and inaccessible. Simply put, digital preservation is different from archival methods that just store the data safely. Active digital preservation brings information forward over time, moving files from old formats to current formats, ensuring it remains readable. Digital preservation systems ensure nothing is lost during transitions through fidelity and fixity of data conversion and keep all the original files alongside a full audit trail of preservation actions.
Addressing the long-term needs of born-digital records upstream in the lifecycle The paradigm for most records managers has been to address the needs of long-term/archival content well into the content’s lifecycle. But, with the scale and pace of what’s happening, it’s now critical to manage or plan how to manage much earlier. The good news is that there are new, automated tools to help organizations and records managers address the long-term needs of records earlier and streamline the process. In 2023, Preservica will launch Preserve365, a ground-breaking new approach to protecting critical long-term high-value records that is seamlessly embedded within the Microsoft 365 governance and discovery experience. Infotechtion and Preservica can work with Microsoft E3 or E5 customers to unify their Microsoft 365 Information Governance across the full information life-cycle, combining Microsoft Purview (formerly known as Microsoft Compliance Center) and Preserve365 embedded records preservation. In next month’s blog, we’ll take a deeper look at the information lifecycle and how new tools in Microsoft 365, including Purview and Preservica’s Preserve365 active digital preservation technology, will work. Want to learn more now? Join Preservica’s Preserve365 Early Access Group here or request a Compliance Workshop to help establish a data driven strategy for managing your information and records.
