Posted by Nick Mehta on Mon, Sep 08, 2008 @ 01:34 AM
Today is the first sunday of the NFL season! (I say that with uncontrollable enthusiasm) And while many fans aspire to see their teams run flea-flickers, reverses and Statue of Liberty plays, most smart coaches know that it's important to start with the basics - blocking and tackling.
Martin Tuip on his Archiving101 blog has a great post about not losing sight of "blocking and tackling" when setting your archiving policies - or KISS, as Martin says. As someone who's seen thousands of archiving customers over the years, Martin's thinking really resonated with me.
Many customers struggle with a desire to design a perfect system:
- Every message is automatically categorized.
- The system figures out what every message really "means."
- It never makes any mistakes.
- It requires no human intervention.
- It keeps everything only as long as necessary, and no longer.
They sit in committees and vendor pitches, waiting for the nirvana solution to emerge. Meanwhile:
- Email storage continues to explode.
- Email backup windows grow every day.
- Users continue to create "underground" archives on their PCs.
- Backup tapes accumulate for legal holds and retention.
- IT is stuck restoring tapes and imaging PCs to respond to legal requests.
- Legal is unsure whether legal holds are really being enforced.
In other words, companies wait to design the perfect play, but get stuck not moving the ball at all and having to punt it away.