Chain of Custody Archive

Chain of Custody Archive
Features and Benefits
Version Tracking
WORM File System
Search

Chain of Custody Archive

Lock Down File Version History

You can react to compliance requirements, and deal with the massive costs and outlays of human resources necessary to address them in an emergency, or you can actively manage them, far ahead of time, at a negligible cost, with almost no impact to your company resources.

Cofio has created a way for organizations to manage Archive and Chain of Custody requirements in an easy and policy driven environment that can be used as a single solution, or as part of a fully unified set of tools for end-to-end data management.

The need for electronic data compliance is cutting across all business types, all departments and all data sets, but particularly unstructured file data, such as human resource documents, accounting spreadsheets, and even multi-media file types, such as pictures, logos and movies.

Showing an established “Chain of Custody” for electronic files can be the difference between costly litigation, and walking away with a final “win”. Courts and auditors want to know if you can provide solid proof for the integrity of the primary data on your live file system, over time. An electronic “Chain of Custody” that is imposed upon the entire data lifecycle has never been available, until now.

Features and Benefits

Feature: Benefit
Real-Time Management: AIMstor operates in real-time, so tracking can be triggered immediately, by someone touching or changing file data in some way, such as creating, modifying, copying, deleting, moving, and more.
Auto Classification: Data Classifications are assigned to files the moment they are created. In this way, AIMstor guides and manages your data through a myriad of business processes that different departments may impose upon it. Perhaps several departments have different policies for the same set of data, or the same file
Forensic Tracking: Archived file versions are tracked in real-time. Offering you “up-to-the-second” forensic reporting on touches to any specific file or data set.
Lifecycle Tracking: File versions are simply part of the AIMstor unified data protection and disaster recovery strategy. Using a centralized source of authority, AIMstor provides a simple, yet comprehensive umbrella over all data.
Searchable Repository: All data is indexed based on file name and attributes, and searchable based on many flexible parameters
Offline Tracking & Blocking: Laptops that are used offline, or machines that lose their network connection, can still maintain requirements for tracking, logging and blocking of specific behaviors regarding certain data.
Behavior Modification and Alert: Control user behavior through policies and classifications that are assigned the moment data is created. By combining Classification types with Track, Block and other Operations, the level of control you exert, and the variety of policies you implement, are only limited by your imagination.
Unify Archive & Data Protection: Why have separate backup, archive and disaster recovery tools, when AIMstor can unify it all under a single, simple umbrella? Unifying Compliance for archive, data protection and disaster recovery, is now a reality.
Protect Intellectual Property: By implementing creation to archive tracking with AIMstor, you can easily view the subsequent chain-of-custody of all files within your policy parameters.
Fast Migration of All Data and Logs: Being able to export data to a live file system for locked down audit review and file search is easily done using AIMstor. You can restore or replicate specific data based upon policies pertaining to certain data, or the whole set of data. You can also easily replicate current live file systems from all machines within the AIMstor domain.
Defending Your Company’s Position: Judges have issued steep fines to major companies for their inability to provide all data arising from items under dispute. AIMstor allows the start to finish snapshot of the totality of data, all originals, copies, changes and even deleted items, together with tracking history.
File Change Aware: Unlike backups that are taken at set intervals, versions are taken when a file changes. For instance, when applied to office documents, every time a document is saved, the version is retained and indexed. This action allows a history of a file to be generated showing how the file changed during the generations. To fully facilitate audits and e-discovery, the extra information is retained, providing the file owner, plus which user and which program modified the file.
Spreadsheet Governance Document Governance: Track function monitors files on primary storage for their entire lifecycle, based on exact file type, who owns them, etc.
Instant WORM Disk Capability: Combined with the Operation called "Block", AIMstor can turn a portion of the primary storage disk into a WORM file system in seconds. WORM (Write Once, Read Many) capability can come in quite handy when you decide to transfer versions from the AIMstor Repository to a WORM for audit or legal review.

Version Tracking

Visible Chain

In the image below, AIMstor uses Track to show the full file history with changes captured in the log, based on who made changes, what are exact changes, and when.

Changes are captured along the timeline using AIMstor's Version function. Restore of particular versions from any specific point in time can help maintain compliance consistency.

WORM File System

WORM File System: Legal, Financial, Medical Data

By implementing the Block function on a Path anywhere on your primary storage, such as a file server, AIMstor can create a Write Once, Read Many capability that can act as an active repository for data that must remain consistent from the exact time of its placement. Additionally, once data is there, you can also Track certain data within the WORM file system, providing a forensic audit trail of any views of the files.

For audits and legal reviews (Audit Hold, Legal Hold, Patient File Audit, Quarter End Report Hold, etc.) the ease of deployment of this WORM capability can go far in helping meet regulatory and compliance needs.

Search

Repository Search

The ability to search repository data via a wide range of definable parameters, such as file extension type, user, owner, and many others, and, the ability to browse past snapshot histories, is not just a great way to facilitate user level restore empowerment, it is also an important way for IT managers and users to understand the overall data itself.

The AIMstor architecture is built on top of search engine technology, allowing real-time Tag-Store-Index of all files and data. The unified metadata store provides a platform built for today, and the future.

Active Archive from Backup?

Because Cofio's AIMstor Repository provides many parameters for incredibly fast Search and Restore of files, it can be used quite easily as a disk-based Active Archive that provides fast "retrieval" of searchable files and file versions.

In the image below, AIMstor shows a full file history with changes captured along the timeline using Version. Restore of particular versions from any specific point in time can help maintain compliance consistency.

: Several AIMstor Operations can be used to create one single policy for many types of Data Protection and Compliance. Version can be combined with Backup for full retention and high performance deduplication of all data, while still maintaining granular, real-time File Versions. Version can also be teamed up with Track to find the Who, What, When of all touches to the Versioned files.
: AIMstor shows a full file history with changes captured along the timeline using Version. In addition, applying Track to the same policy will show forensic details of all changes and creations. Restore of particular versions from any specific point in time can help maintain compliance consistency. In this example, with 32 million files in this repository, the Version and Tracking search came back with the results in less than 1 second.