Picking Up the Pieces After Downsizing: Avoid Orphaned Data

By Chris Winter, TechNewsWorld 
June 09, 2009 

Layoffs and high-turnover periods can be chaotic for IT departments due to their propensity for creating orphaned data. Enterprises can safeguard against lost information by instituting centralized control policies and deploying technologies designed to immediately and easily recover wayward data.

Employees are the lifeblood of any business, and the data they produce is critical to productivity. Unfortunately, during recent uncertain economic times, businesses of all sizes across America have laid off hundreds of thousands of employees. Yet when any employees leave during turnover, important data can be lost or forgotten. Such “orphaned data” can consist of any business information, application or intellectual property that has become unrecoverable because it was left on no-longer-accessible edge devices like laptops that were never backed up, or was simply never transferred to a backup-accessible server.

In times of workforce turnover, organizations need to retain mission-critical data to keep remaining business teams productive. Continued productivity depends on seamlessly retaining every team member’s intellectual property, such as prospect lists, business plans, research or financials, as well as withholding it from unauthorized disclosure. In order to retain this crucial intellectual property, organizations needs to be able to enforce policy to capture and retain any orphaned data.

To safeguard against orphaned data, businesses should take steps to (1) prevent data from being unintentionally orphaned on distributed edge devices; (2) established centralized control over retaining all potentially orphaned data; and (3) deploy technology that is able to reliably, flexibly, and easily recover that data under any circumstances.

Preventing Orphaned Data

The first step in prevention is identifying potential repositories for orphaned data. In order to course-correct business continuity planning and …

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