Information Risk Management

Businesses today rely on employee, customer and partner collaboration using electronic information -- making email, SharePoint, IM and related systems critical to the success of the organization. At the same time, however, IT organizations are struggling with the short- and long-term challenges caused by the massive growth in unstructured information. Simply stated, IT must:

• Keep bad stuff out, such as viruses, spam and other malicious programs designed to steal information
• Keep good stuff in, such as intellectual property and other sensitive information
• Efficiently store the right information for the right amount of time -- no more, and no less
• Be able to quickly find all relevant information for business, legal and regulatory purposes

The challenges of securing, storing and searching this information throughout its useful life are compounded because unstructured information is everywhere -- traversing the network on endpoints, in storage and in collaborative applications like email and SharePoint.

To effectively secure and manage information in this increasingly challenging environment, organizations will need to adopt a more comprehensive information risk management strategy -- one that makes it easy to secure, manage and leverage information, but without disrupting the business. They need a strategy that ultimately allows the organization to protect its information everywhere, reduce storage costs, and automate high cost work flows.

Information Risk Management In Real Life
The ING Renault Formula 1 racing team is involved in one of the most competitive motor sports teams in the world. The ING Renault team hand builds cars and engines at two locations in England and France, and tests and races them on circuits around the world using the latest and most sophisticated manufacturing and logistics processes.

The car itself generates huge volumes of information -- wirelessly transmitting megabytes of telemetry data every time it passes the pit lane. With the team sending and receiving more than 400,000 emails per week, the team’s messaging infrastructure was buckling under the strain with several crashes of its Exchange system. It was also being further stressed by spam -- unwanted messages that annoyed employees and added to the storage burden.

The team was able to get their spam issue under control using gateway filtering that cut spam volume without stopping legitimate messages, and added active email archiving to get storage under control and dramatically reduce the size of its Exchange message store. This eliminated the crashes and reduced storage by 40 percent.

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