Checks in a 21st Century digital world

By Glenn Wheeler, president, Viewpointe Clearing, Settlement & Association Services, Viewpointe

Is the check dead? You might hear a near-unanimous “yes” to that question; or as others might say more accurately, check usage is simply on a long decline. While check usage has been dwindling in recent years, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. A recent study shows a sizeable segment of the market still writes checks.

As The 2010 Federal Reserve Payments Study, which looks at noncash payments in the U.S. from 2006 through 2009, indicates electronic payments are quickly outstripping check payments; yet checks have remained a significant payment instrument – to the tune of $31.6 trillion in value paid in 2009. While businesses far outweigh consumers in the total dollar value of the checks paid, consumers overall continue to write more checks, according to the findings. And, the study found that while the number of checks written overall has declined more than 7 percent from 2006 to 2009, the volume of consumer-to-consumer check payments has actually grown in that same time period, from 2.2 billion to 2.4 billion.

Where is the consumer-to-consumer check-writing trend heading? Despite its overall decline, there are those who continue to see the value in this traditional payment method. A January New York Times story, Social Security and Welfare Benefits Going Paperless, about the U.S. government’s decision to pay benefits electronically, chronicled how the elderly have continued to opt to receive old-reliable checks versus the government’s proposed electronic deposit of social security payments.

While this one segment of the population alone will not keep checks going indefinitely, technology might encourage some of the smartphone-wielding segment of the population to continue circulating them. According to a recent American Banker article, For Mobile Deposit, Banks Choose Speed-to-Market Over Simplicity, banks are rushing ahead with mobile check deposit technology at the behest of their customers who are using the technology to deposit checks without having to step foot in a bank.

As electronic payments technology continues to evolve – from mobile payment apps to “tap-and-pay” payments using near field communications (NFC), financial institutions and their customers can easily move into a new payments world. Embracing the budding technology will, no doubt, bring new challenges, but with ease of use and the promise of potential growth to the financial institution’s bottom line it could be a worthwhile investment.

Even in our digital age, the old-fashioned check may still stand up as a viable complement to the technologically advanced payment methods.

What do you think?

Data: Lost or Misplaced?

By Rich Walsh

In taking a look at the Kroll Ontrack “Global Data Loss Causes” survey, I found it interesting that 90 percent of responders have lost data, and 18 percent did not know how the data went missing. Mind you, these losses could be attributed to such occurrences as data that has been corrupted by a virus or just human error – files being misfiled or accidentally deleted. But, I immediately thought, “Perhaps it wasn’t lost; it just couldn’t be found.”

Having written and spoken about data storage for years, one theme has remained constant: the amount of data that corporations must manage is growing and shows no signs of stopping. Keeping track of this mass of data is a daunting challenge for many companies.

I often hear from IT executives that they are frustrated by the multitude of archiving systems at their organizations as more and more repositories are installed to meet data growth. Misplacing data becomes very plausible, and even typical, in this type of environment.

Losing data is never a good thing and when it happens, whether in a household or at a major corporation, it can create some headaches – to put it mildly. In the current environment, losing data is simply not an option as new regulations are sure to put more demands on data recovery. The consequences for missing data can be severe; you only need to read the mortgage-foreclosure headlines to get a sense of this.

Storage professionals may be feeling pressure from IT executives to fix the problem while managing costs. Data management should not be an obstacle to a corporation’s primary business objective. Now is the ideal time to address this issue because there is no apparent end in sight for the onslaught of data.

How is your company handling the barrage?

Rich Walsh is President, Document Archive & Repository Services at Viewpointe. He has more than 25 years of operational information technology experience.

What’s keeping CEOs up at night?

By Rich Walsh

Storage professionals who want to bring new ideas to their organizations on how better to manage corporate data might want to take note of Gartner, Inc.’s “seven major CEO concerns that CIOs should address.”

Gartner’s guide for CIOs provides some excellent insight into what management (CEOs in particular) expects from any new project that involves additional spending or technology upgrades. For example, what Gartner outlines in “investing in new cost efficiencies” is consistent with offsite e-storage management plans that I have been discussing with companies of late.

Not surprisingly, anything that saves money will be viewed favorably. As Gartner’s analysts put it, “CIOs proposing larger structural cost-saving ideas, such as major end-to-end process changes or automations, will likely receive CEO approval.”

Additionally, Gartner points out that CEOs are increasingly expecting that solutions be long-term and sustainable. Ideally, anything proposed should not simply be a quick fix.

Offsite data storage projects can meet those requirements and, done right, can produce long-term cost savings and sustainable solutions. Your management team might be interested to know that many businesses have been gradually moving to offsite data management, successfully trimming costs while being able to continue to access, control and monitor their records.

What steps are you taking to improve operations, your role in IT and data management overall?

Rich Walsh is president, Document Archive & Repository Services at Viewpointe. Rich has more than 25 years of operational information technology experience.

E-Discovery: Addressing the Risks

By Rich Walsh of Viewpointe

At the heart of many risks facing companies today lurks e-discovery – the locating and accessing of electronically stored information (ESI) for purposes of litigation. ESI can be any electronically stored information – documents, emails, databases, etc. – potentially for use as evidence by lawyers in legal cases.

Compounding the risk to companies is the volume of data subject to e-discovery. In fact, the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists, a group dedicated to dealing with this problem, calls the deluge of electronically stored material used as evidence in civil actions the single biggest storyline in the legal world today.

In a recent cross-industry report commissioned by the Deloitte Forensic Center, “E-Discovery: Mitigating Risk Through Better Communication,” just 43 percent of the respondents felt that their companies were somewhat up for the e-discovery challenge. The report notes that in the e-discovery process legal, IT and other departments – those that don’t normally work together – are often thrown together “in a room” to do a difficult job under quite a bit of pressure. And with a lack of common language and systems among these groups, it only further muddies the process.

Where is all of this leading? The Deloitte report found that 49 percent of respondents expect their company’s IT department to have to work more on e-discovery efforts in the near future. So, on top of IT’s workload and limited budgets, adding new e-discovery work will further challenge their priorities. In preparation, companies will need to figure out, sooner than later, where (and even if) they have stored and can easily retrieve everything they might need to produce.

I’d love to hear from TAWPI members as how your companies may be preparing for this challenge. Any tips for colleagues? Share with us.

Rich Walsh is president, Document Archive & Repository Services at Viewpointe. He has more than 25 years of operational information technology experience.

The Hunt for "Orphan Storage"

By Rich Walsh, Viewpointe (www.viewpointe.com)

Storage professionals are now under pressure to find and use “orphan storage,” rather than buying or building more capacity. Orphan storage is a form of unused or unallocated data in everything from a database to disk drives and storage area networks. The problem seems so universal, that I hear this almost everywhere I go. I recently heard one executive say: “When we buy storage, we know where it is, but now our mandate has become finding unused storage, wherever it happens to be.”

Symantec’s CEO has even gone so far as to tell the market to "stop buying storage." I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. Not being able to use your existing space or, worse, access the storage you already have – those seem to be the larger problems. Certainly IT executives are probably both gratified and mortified that this issue, which is hardly new to them, is finally getting some attention.

Recently, we asked IDC to take a deeper dive into this issue; and in a whitepaper, IDC noted outsourced storage as a good solution to the growing capacity problem. Generally they concluded that for easy access, as well as appropriate amounts of storage, outsourced systems work very well. Moving data to a hosted repository allows companies to pay only for the actual capacity they currently need, as opposed to an in-house infrastructure that is generally built for future consumption. And, this approach may be better suited for accessing the needed data at a later date.

Right now, IT executives want to make good use of all the equipment and devices that they have already purchased, and that is sound business judgment. Still, at some point, organizations are going to deplete the space they have and simply purging existing files may not be enough to keep up with the increased demand.

However, the question remains: What should companies do once they have determined just how much existing storage they have? Will they continue to buy ad-hoc, only to be faced with the exact same orphan storage problem in a few more months? Or, is it time for a fresh approach to this ever-growing problem?