HP Structured Records Management Solution Tutorial, August 2011

HP Structured Records Management Solution Tutorial 11
Structured records management
Records management traditionally concerned itself with information printed on
paper. These records included:
• narrative papers such as correspondence, memos, and policies.
• non-narrative papers, such as inventories, general ledgers, and customer
registers.
When records management moved into the digital age, it took control of the
electronic equivalents of narrative papers, namely unstructured information.
Records management tended to neglect the more structured, non-narrative
information because it was seemingly managed by the line of business
applications that generated, used, and stored it.
The costs and risks of infinite retention
Over time, corporations and organizations came to understand that simply
allowing structured records to accumulate in databases indefinitely lead to both
increased costs and risks:
• Maintaining very old, infrequently-accessed data and systems for the sole
purpose of potential legal discovery is extremely expensive. Such data and
systems invariably become a major drain on data center resources and
personnel.
• Keeping data indefinitely can, in some cases, put your corporation or
organization at greater legal risk. Very few of the applications or their
underlying databases provide features to manage the data from a records
management point of view. Hence, structured records are often kept far longer
than they would be if standard corporate retention policies were applied to
them in a systematic way.
HP Structured Records Management Solution (SRMS)
The best solution to structured records management is to extract older,
infrequently accessed data from the source applications into an open,
standards-based format (XML) for future ease of access. This standard format can
then be ingested into the corporate records management system for long term
management and eventual disposal according to corporate policy.
Extracting and purging inactive data from the source systems brings many
benefits:
• Systems become more performant with a smaller footprint and reduced
backup volumes.
• Legacy systems can be retired.
• Database management costs are reduced.
• Saved resources may be re-purposed for other, more current applications and
databases.