Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Storage Admins Fear Regs: Page 2 of 3

"The regulations are coming out, but they are not in tune with IT reality," says Gene Piatigorski, storage manager at New York Life Insurance. "At this point, I feel like going and opening a dry cleaners."

Piatigorski says he needs something like a CliffsNotes guide that condenses all the new regulations into an understandable format. "I'm not a lawyer," he says. "I don't understand 99 percent of what it means."

Specifically, Piatigorski says he is struggling with regulations that address email archiving. "I don't know how to determine which part to keep and which to ditch."

Industry specialists say email and document retention management is more a policy-enforcement problem than a technical one. "All data needs to be classified and handled accordingly," says John Butler, co-founder of LiveVault Corp., which develops software that backs up data to third-party outsourcers.

Butler argues that hiring an expert or outsourcing the task to a company like Iron Mountain Inc., a data storage hosting firm, can help mitigate the risk. "You can't outsource the legal responsibility, but it is colossally impractical to manage this task yourself," he says. [Ed. note: Iron Mountain is a reseller of LiveVault's software.]