New Regulations Mean More Data To StoreNew Regulations Mean More Data To Store

Many companies are making changes to comply with some sort of regulation. New regs force businesses to re-evaluate corporate governance and business processes, and storage management and the tools needed to achieve data compliance must change, too.

Content-retention systems, including those with write-once capabilities, are available from many vendors. ATA disk-based storage is becoming the standard hardware architecture for online-recovery requirements, part of some regulations. These systems would be useless without compatible management and data-retention software.

Are these tools finding a ready market of buyers? Seven in 10 business-technology professionals in information Media Network's The New Age Of Regulatory Compliance study report using storage and documentation tools to ensure data integrity and information retention in compliance with regulations. When asked what best describes the impact of legislation on business operations, most say it's a part of doing business in the 21st century. Nearly 40% of the study's 650 participants say regulatory compliance has had a positive effect on their companies, forcing them to take stock of data and applications. Another 39% report no direct impact yet.

Compliance regulations are expected to have more data-related consequences for employees than business partners. Three-quarters of respondents expect regulations to increase data-access restrictions among employees. This is to be expected as most regulations are designed to minimize interference and corruption of information and improve financial reporting. Only about a quarter of respondents think they'll need increased controls on information available to business partners.

What storage improvements will you make in the first half of 2004 to ensure compliance with government regulations? Let us know.

Martin J. Garvey
Senior Editor
[email protected]

Compliance Effects

Which best describes the impact that complying with regulations is having on your business?

Not all companies say complying with regulations has a positive effect on business operations. Data-centric legislation such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Sarbanes-Oxley force businesses to retain large quantities of information, putting pressure on storage systems and increasing the complexity of data classification. In fact, nearly a quarter of business-technology professionals surveyed in August said regulations have a negative impact on their companies' business.

Regulatory Woes

Are compliance regulations having a negative impact, forcing your company to retain data it doesn't need?

Smaller companies report suffering the most from their efforts to abide by regulatory guidelines. Government regulations have a negative impact on the business operations of one-fourth of companies surveyed with revenue below $1 billion. They attribute this problem principally to the need to retain unnecessary information. A fifth of larger businesses say compliance is causing them problems for the same reason.

Limiting Access

Is compliance with government regulations more closely restricting employee access to certain data?

Companies of all sizes have to contend with access-control issues to achieve compliance with government regulations. Only a quarter of the study's 650 sites report that regulatory compliance won't require tighter restrictions for employee access to company data. Instead, more-restrictive measures are reported as necessary at 79% of large companies, 71% of midsize businesses, and 77% of small sites.

Ownership Issues

Is compliance making it more difficult to work with business partners because of data-ownership issues?

Managers in large companies worry that compliance is complicating relationships with business partners. A third of businesses with annual revenue of $1 billion or more report that data-ownership issues have occurred as they've worked to comply with new regulations. This isn't as much of an issue for the study's 429 smaller companies. Only one in five of these businesses report ownership issues have arisen with information shared among business associates.