Over the last several years legislative and regulatory requirements have increased the burden on business to preserve and protect a variety of business data over varying periods with differing protection and recovery requirements. Major financial scandals and a number of recent incidents involving large-scale data loss have turned the spotlight on the management and retention of company data.

Today, organizations of all sizes are subject to a wide range national and international government regulations. Regulations seek to control financial records, legal information, health and safety data, email, instant messages, video surveillance records and access to personal or public records. In some cases these regulations can be very detailed, spelling out key criteria and procedures that must be met to ensure compliance with regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, GLB and Sec. 17-4a. This paper provides us with an illustration of two common archive objectives that are tightly linked to storage media attributes: record authenticity and record disposition.

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