"Our team has conducted data migrations for highly regulated enterprises that range anywhere from one to ten petabytes, which is billions of files," explains Rohit Khanna, the Chief Customer Officer at Smarsh. This immense amount of data cannot be handled with a simple drag-and-drop action.
Despite technological advancements and the availability of sophisticated cloud infrastructures, the process of moving and storing such vast quantities of information is anything but straightforward. Each step carries the risk of costly errors that can cause irreparable damage to an organisation. Data migrations can be especially complex for organisations in highly regulated sectors, such as financial services, where the stakes for data integrity and security are even higher.
Why are archive data migrations so complex? Specifically electronic communications compliance archive migrations.
This complexity results from the need to handle the data in a way that ensures a faithful copy of the original message in accordance with regulatory guidelines and FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure). Additionally, stringent data privacy regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act), and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) mandate strict protocols for the handling, transfer, and storage of personal data. Non-compliance can result in significant financial penalties and reputational damage. It is important to note that mistakes here are extremely costly, and organisations might not get a second chance. An organisation's process design must be legally defensible if challenged by regulators or during litigation. Fines for defensibility failures can range from the millions to over a billion dollars.
The challenge of migrating electronic communications data should not be underestimated. The vast volumes of data stored for compliance purposes have slowed enterprise archival architectures for decades, making these six steps essential for successful electronic communications archive migration:
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Data Harvest / Extraction
This first step is critical to ensure a successful data migration. It requires meticulously extracting data from diverse sources ranging from various legacy products and standard file formats to custom-built sources. Given the high stakes of compliance archives, it's paramount that this step is executed precisely, ensuring that a faithful representation of the original data is maintained. This precision is crucial for meeting regulatory guidelines and maintaining the integrity of the data throughout the migration process.
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Processing
Once data is harvested, it undergoes processing. Unlike traditional data manipulation, which may involve transformation, this step focuses on producing a copy of the data that is faithful to the original. This nuance is critical in electronic communications compliance archives, where any alteration could compromise the data's defensibility. The challenge lies in maintaining the integrity of the message while preparing it for the following stages of migration without any transformation that could be challenged under legal scrutiny.
