Do you treat compliance as a cost to be contained? A business requirement to be completed with as little investment as possible? If this is how you approach such measures as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, you’re missing an opportunity to turn your compliance program into a chance to drive ROI. Think about your backup and archiving operation: the changes you make to attain compliance can have benefits throughout the enterprise.
As it is, backup and archiving is a cost that comes with little ROI opportunity. You can streamline your process to make backups faster and consume fewer resources, but this is traditionally viewed as a way to control expenses that are unavoidable … which is a long way from actually generating a return on your storage management investment. For compliance, the situation is much the same: the focus tends to be on keeping mandatory costs as low as possible. Since compliance programs often intersect with backup and archiving, you’re stuck trying to keep two significant initiatives from occupying your limited budget.
