Case Study: In-Place Governance

AEROSPACE COMPANY "CUTS THE CLUTTER," ENFORCES RETENTION AND DISPOSITION POLICIES WITH PROOFPOINT ENTERPRISE GOVERNANCE

Since 1969, this global engineering firm has been providing high-quality services and solutions to engineering-driven organizations throughout the world. But they needed help solving a problem of their own—over 20 years worth of documents and files that no longer had any business value.

Proofpoint Enterprise Governance was able to help them clean up their unwanted legacy data, while moving forward with proactive "delete by design" policies to protect the company well into the future.

BUSINESS NEED

For over 40 years, this company has provided high-quality services and solutions to engineering-driven organizations throughout the world in sectors including defense & aerospace, commercial aviation, manufacturing, and energy. Since its founding in 1969, it has grown to become a wholly owned subsidiary of a large aerospace company, known for its innovative ideas and ability to help its customers reach new heights.

According to the company's Corporate Records Manager and Policies & Procedures Manager, there were two primary information governance issues that needed to be solved. First, they wanted to clean up all unneeded, legacy data. As the Corporate Records Manager put it, "We are getting rid of all our ancient files—documents and files that no longer have business value, some of which have been hanging around for 20 to 30 years. When these files no longer have business value, they become liabilities instead of assets to our company. We've defined a term for this information: non-essential junk."

Second, the company sought to provide employees with a "go forward" way to stay current with internal retention policies. "This is not about a one-time clean-up," said the Corporate Records Manager. "It's about a proactive, systematic way to ensure that we abide by our information governance policies going forward."

SOLUTION

So how does Proofpoint Enterprise Governance help this company cull existing "non-essential junk" and help employees keep more "non-essential junk" from building up? Proofpoint's solution is uniquely proactive in its approach to this kind of information governance, using patented algorithms to create and maintain a "Digital Thread™" similar to an RFID tracking chip for each document. Because of this "Digital Thread," Proofpoint Enterprise Governance can act like both a GPS that knows where and what each document is and a remote control that can apply policies and control document lifecycles from a distance.

Proofpoint Enterprise Governance can track relationships between copies and versions of users' documents as they grow, change, and spread throughout users' various drives, email inboxes, and document repositories. It also helps the customer "clean out the closet" by removing unnecessary information in a legally defensible manner. Similarly, the system can help users and record administrators easily identify any copies that should be kept.

And unlike typical centralized information governance systems and document repositories, Proofpoint Enterprise Governance applies policies to manage unstructured information and make changes to documents and records "in place"—no matter where that information is stored. Because of this in-place method of operation, Proofpoint Enterprise Governance is able to make the customer's ongoing cleanup program an easy-to-use part of the workday for all its employees and managers and enables consistent retention across all electronic documents and email without trouble.

BENEFITS

By deploying Proofpoint Enterprise Governance, this customer is already seeing fulfillment of its information governance objectives. "Our employees are more productive with less clutter around. Tools like Proofpoint Enterprise Governance really help," the Corporate Records Manager said.

The company now has consistent retention and disposition rules that can be applied across all of its documents and email "in place," regardless of where the files are stored, making it less of a hassle for employees to follow policy. They are also more in line with industry standards and crucial government regulations.

"Federal Rules of Civil Procedure dictate that we must apply a simple retention schedule across all of our information, and Proofpoint Enterprise Governance is helping us to do that," the Corporate Records Manager said.

Proper retention policies will also help the company be prepared in the event of litigation, and help prevent them from getting "burned in a lawsuit," as the company put it. In addition, Proofpoint Enterprise Governance also helps reduce everyday storage costs.