When Information Governance and Data Privacy Collide

The so-called “Big Data” problem has caused many organizations to breathe new life into their record-retention programs. A whole new discipline ' information governance ' has emerged as a framework to govern the creation, use, retention and disposition of information, as well as the technical platforms on which the information resides. While storage may still be cheap, with the ever-increasing data volumes, even traditional infrastructure organization is being challenged. As a result, more multinational corporations are moving to the cloud as a cost-savings mechanism for everything from e-mail to database storage and document creation, such as Google Docs. In addition, while corporate IT may have been driven by a goal to decentralize over the past several years, the current trend toward centralization of company information to achieve cost savings carries the day today. This all sounds like a great first step in an organization's attempt to get its hand around its own Big Data issues. But what happens when what makes the most business sense might actually be putting the company at risk?