Manual Labor

While Long & Foster toils over the security and storage of software coding data, IT officials at the George Washington University (GWU) in Washington are scratching their heads over the best way to secure e-mail and other ad hoc files. "I think there is a lot more out there than we are giving credit to. And right now, we are just not able to treat this unstructured data with the rigor we do official hard copies of information," says Dave Swartz, the university's vice president and CIO.

GWU worked hard for years to assign security levels and storage procedures to its many structured data sets and has created a universitywide data-classification policy. "First, we had to get the basics in place," says Swartz. GWU relies on EMC Corp.'s Symmetrix DMX series of network-attached storage products to categorize and apply security policies to its structured data, which includes legal documents, contracts and grant-related information.

More confounding has been unstructured data, Swartz says. "We have manually designated folders and set up an encrypted archive to put e-mail and other files into a document management system. So we are able to intelligently drag and drop files into the proper folders. We understand what we are doing, but it is not automatic," he says.

Swartz says he is aware of and interested in the growing class of ICM vendors. However, GWU's adoption of their tools is still a ways off.