Storage Administrators Gain Status With New e-Discovery Rules

Computerworld - In the nine months since Ed Rolison became a storage analyst at a leading global bank in England, he hasnt exactly become the most recognizable person in the office. Rolison, a contractor from IT services provider Getronics NV, rarely talks with colleagues about support of the firms SAN environment.

Its still mostly a background role, he says.

But all that could change as the bank installs new EMC Centera storage systems and an enterprise vault in order to make it easier for up to 40,000 employees to access e-mail and other records from its archiving systems for legal purposes.

As access to archived records is simplified for bank employees over the next few months, Rolison will likely have a more discernible role in the organization  even if he doesnt suddenly become the big man on campus. More and more people are realizing the importance of managing, moving and maintaining multiple terabytes of data, he says.

Rolison doesnt expect to achieve celebrity status, but his situation is representative of how storage administrators are beginning to gain stature in their organizations. Thats because storage professionals are increasingly being called upon to work more closely with corporate legal departments. Theyre also assisting with electronic discovery efforts to help satisfy regulatory requirements for determining where information resides within a business and how its being managed.

For storage professionals who have this type of expertise, the boom in e-discovery work is creating new roles and opportunities, says Frank Wu, managing director at Protiviti Inc., a consultancy in Menlo Park, Calif.

Many storage administrators at publicly held U.S. companies already have to deal with obligations imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, since they often support corporate officers who are held accountable for the security and access rights to financial data. More recently, storage professionals have become more involved in dealing with stiffer e-discovery rules. The upshot is that some corporate legal departments have already begun working more closely with storage administrators to determine where critical information may reside and how to access it.

As a result, storage administrators are rising up the stack in a lot of companies, says Andy Cohen, associate general counsel at EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, Mass.

The Stakes Get Higher

But this emergence from near anonymity is a double-edged sword for some storage professionals, notes Richard Scannell, senior vice president of sales and marketing at GlassHouse Technologies Inc., an IT infrastructure consultancy in Framingham, Mass. Scannell, who earlier in his career oversaw a 160-person IT unit at Motorola Inc., says the increased visibility for storage administrators also means added pressure.