Illustration : Thierry Cap de Coume
The example is a little extreme, but it is a marvellous illustration of the importance of archiving sensitive data: many banks were aware that they were exposed to subprimes, but some had difficulty, or still have difficulty, in situating the now famous “toxic assets”.
Data archiving for banks, as well as industrial companies, is exactly what the Swiss company RSD has been doing since 1973. “The sub-prime crisis brought something beneficial from our point of view: it made the necessity for companies to take control of their information flux even more pressing,” explains Pierre Van Beneden, formerly of Oracle, Lotus and Adobe, who has taken over the helm of this Genevan company that distributes its software to some thirty countries throughout the world.
Indexing, classifying, finding the right information within tight deadlines so that it can serve as legal proof: these are tasks that require forward planning. The rise in the number of documents created or received by companies is in fact exponential.
In a world where we no longer talk of gigaoctets or teraoctets but petaoctets (1 million gigaoctets), archivists are becoming the experts in information governance. “More and more, dynamic and evolving research methods must be used that allow for investigating, if need be, one’s exposure to possible commercial or technical risks,” continues Pierre Van Beneden, who believes that software developed should have the capacity to situate useful information within a company spread out over numerous subsidiaries. But also ensure that documents are kept according to the regulations in force in each country.
Indeed, the challenge of information governance far exceeds the issue of document management in strict terms. “Too often, companies still confuse storage and saving with archiving. The latter refers to notions of authenticity, integrity and availability,” puts forward Didier Basset, Operations Manager. “It aims at guaranteeing the pereniality of information and at allowing it to be recovered intact, essential conditions for constituting an element of proof if the need arises.” This is why companies should increasingly implement new technologies and new practices based on extremely reliable and high-performance access to information in documents, reports and other essential files for their activities, wherever they may be stored, throughout their lifetimes.
France is ahead of other countries in this area: the law on the modernisation of the economy (law of 14 October 2008) now authorises companies to dematerialise payslips as long as employees so consent. Given that costs involved in producing and distributing each payslip comes to 0.90 euro, potential savings in this domain equal 210 million euros for French companies, a not insignificant sum. As an offshoot of this development, RSD has delivered a French Chamber of Commerce and Industry its new RSD ArchLive HR software, which allows all documents relating to HR management to be overseen, while offering 4,000 employees of the Chamber access to a secure electronic safe where they can store their data. “We have developed this product specifically for HR after observing that several of our clients used one of our products themselves. This contributes to our desire to gear ourselves more towards ready-to-use solutions,” concludes Pierre Van Beneden.
RSD in a nutshell
Established in 1973 in Geneva, with subsidiaries in New York and London, RSD is one of the world leaders in software for content management, archiving and document recovery. RSD solutions are used by over 1,200 organisations throughout the world, including many amongst the “Fortune 500”. Today, RSD counts over 2 million users and commercialises its solutions, services and products in over 30 countries.
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