The Five Pitfalls Of ECM Information Protection — And How To Avoid Them By Cindy Elliott, CYA Technologies

Enterprise Content Management applications offer companies the ability to do far more than create, manage and share unstructured content (including documents, web content, video and scanned images), which was one of the original selling points for the technology. The real benefits- improved organizational collaboration, workflow, operational continuity and increased productivity – go well beyond the limits of document management to include support for a growing number of applications that contain a range of structured and unstructured data. For applications such as electronic FDA drug approval submissions, document repositories for FAA flight maintenance manuals, loan processing, contracts retention management, and construction bids management, for example, ECM offers a powerful solution for managing documents, workflows, document artifacts and audit trails.

As with any complex system containing a subset of an organization's vital data, ECM systems must be meticulously architected and implemented to realize the full value of the investment. Unfortunately, most implementations fail to fully safeguard the information managed in ECM repositories from the incidents that can hurt their business the most.

An average organization may have more than 20 data repositories (AIIM study, "From Plans to Projects: How ECM Technologies Get Implemented", 2005). Assuming that each repository is protected adequately by the organization's existing enterprise data protection solution poses an unacceptable risk in today's regulated, high performance business environment.