Staying Ahead of the Storm at AIIM
This week, Boston hosted the annual AIIM/On Demand conference and exposition. I participated, representing the DocuShare Business Unit as an attendee, a speaker, and a show floor “demo guy.”
While my professional obligations kept me from attending many sessions or “taking the temperature” of the show and marketplace, I can share a bit my experience from a presentation I gave at the show. AIIM, of course, is focused on enterprise content management and imaging – the capture and management of critical business information, usually document-based or -targeted. What better way to get the full story than go straight to the source – so I collaborated with one of Xerox’s customers to discuss the role of ECM in disaster recovery planning.
Abdiel Ortiz is the CTO (Court Technology Officer) for the 13th Judicial District Court of the State of Florida. Based in Tampa, Abdiel leads the charge within Florida’s judiciary for developing, proving, and deploying innovative solutions to information management problems. As part of an organization which must meet many high standards for information management and retention (and with serious consequences if those mandates are not met, e.g. the potential release of criminals), Abdiel takes his job very seriously. And as a resident of an area which is almost entirely less than eight feet above sea level and subject to regular hurricanes, he takes seriously the challenges of planning for the continuity of business operations and information accessibility in the event of natural or other disasters. DocuShare is one of many systems Abdiel and his team is responsible for, and it serves as the primary content management solution for a diversity of court records and documents. If DocuShare stops, the judicial process stops.
In our talk, entitled “Staying Ahead of the Storm,” Abdiel described how the 13th District has implemented redundancy in and geographically distributed their core IT infrastructure, targeting no more than 24 hours of downtime. Of equal importance, he described the planning, including documentation, processes and human resources, needed to ensure continuity of operations, including migration to hot sites or even adjacent counties if needed. I followed Abdiel with an overview of the elements of a disaster recovery plan, the levels of preparation possible (and the cost trade-offs associated with those different levels), and several anecdotal bits of advise for attendees to consider as they pursue assessment of their own readiness and development of their own plans.
As a key point of my presentation, I advocated for the role of the Enterprise Content Management system as a primary strategic element in any organization’s DR planning. Continuity of data availability and processing is critical for ongoing business operations. ECM systems enable the digital capture, management, and distribution of document-based information. A well-designed ECM system provides a platform which supports the implementation of a DR-ready document management solution which can be critical to the recovery and survival of a business after a disaster. And as demonstrated in Tampa, technologies like DocuShare, paired with appropriate host, database, and network technology, supports the implementation of both high availability solutions (tolerant of failures within the data center) and disaster-ready solutions (tolerant of the loss of an entire data center).
Abdiel did a great job telling his story and why it’s so important to “stay ahead of the storm.”
Tom Love
Director, Sales Engineering
DocuShare Business Unit/Xerox Global Services