Developing these policies certainly isn’t easy. But enforcing them across the whole enterprise presents an even bigger challenge. Most organizations have implemented some kind of centralized solution to enforce and manage sound document retention policies. But these solutions are effective on their own only when users remember to archive documents on a centralized server—and take the time to purge all local copies and versions of the document from individual machines.
Unfortunately, remembering which documents are subject to retention policies, deciding which documents should be saved to a centralized repository, and taking the time to upload them to the server is a time consuming chore that most corporate workers simply won’t bother with. As a result, document retention policies suffer from dismal adoption rates—usually as low as 0-5 percent—and far too many corporate documents fall outside the protective net created by centralized document retention systems.
The challenge, then, lies in finding an effective way to bridge the gap between these centralized systems and the individual desktops, e-mail attachments and peripheral storage devices where most documents are stored.
Businesses use a number of common approaches to enforce document retention policies at the edges of the enterprise, and each approach has its own unique advantages and disadvantages:
