(Clearwater, FL) — In today’s business environment, IT managers in the financial sector face a twofold — and daunting — challenge. In the wake of the business scandals of the 1990s and the near-collapse of the global banking system in 2008-2009, a number of complex laws were put in place to regulate the content and reporting of financial data. More recently, financial institutions have taken the lead in adopting massively complex big-data technology. To deal with these requirements, IT managers are being forced to revise their file systems and migrate data, both to more robust internal data handling systems and, increasingly, to the cloud.
“Data migration is a major issue for the financial industry,” says LinkTek Chief Operating Officer Ed Clark, “and it’s an issue about which they’ve historically been somewhat apprehensive.”
Clark cites a multi-industry survey by market research agency Vanson Bourne, in which a massive 72% of senior financial-sector IT decision-makers surveyed indicated that they had chosen not to migrate data due to the risk, cost, time and resources needed for such projects. Moreover, the larger the companies, the more risk-averse they were: 56% of companies with fewer than 3,000 employees said they avoided data migration projects, as opposed to 64% of companies with 3,000 employees or more.(1)
These concerns, Clark notes, are not unfounded. A more recent study of 3,300 global IT decision-makers shows that data loss and downtime amount to a $1.7 trillion burden for enterprises worldwide — equivalent to nearly half the gross domestic product of Germany. Of those surveyed, 64% described data protection as “totally critical” to the success of their organizations. However, 49% said their organizations had suffered unplanned downtime during the preceding 12 months, and 32% had experienced data loss. While hardware and software failure and loss of power were cited as the leading causes of data disruption, 29% of respondents mentioned data corruption — such as broken file links — as a cause. The most severe consequences of data disruption mentioned were loss of employee productivity (47%), loss of revenue (36%), delay in product or service development (34%), loss of customer confidence and loyalty (24%), and loss of new business opportunity (20%).(2)
For all of the potential pitfalls, however, the need to upgrade file and storage systems on an ongoing basis — and, consequently, to perform data migrations—has become a daily fact of life in financial institutions, due in large part to the industry’s embracing big-data technology. A 2013 survey of Wall Street firms by NewVantage Partners, in fact, found that 96% of surveyed executives had big data initiatives in the works.(3)
For cost and efficiency reasons, cloud services are almost universally employed in big data applications. “And when you put data into the cloud,” says Clark, “you are carrying out a data migration. One of the most essential tasks in migrating data successfully is maintaining links contained within the data.”
To avoid broken file links and consequent data corruption, financial sector IT managers involved in data migration are increasingly turning to LinkTek Corporation’s LinkFixer Advanced, the world’s leading solution for the management and automatic repair of broken file links.
“Enterprises such as financial institutions, governments, and oil and gas companies spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in man-hours having to repair broken file links manually after migrations,” Clark states. “We see it routinely — expenditures that were not predicted in the project budget to repair broken file links have made companies scared of migration.”
LinkFixer Advanced can economically, , safely and rapidly help to protect maintain file integrity during a wide variety of data migrations, saving financial institutions money and time, particularly for:
- Migrations due to upgrading or adding new computer hardware — for example, moving data (files and folders) from a legacy hardware system to a new one;
- Migrations due to changing the operating system (OS) of the organization’s network servers — for example, from Novell to Windows;
- Migration of data from network file servers to network attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN);
- Data migration into a content management system (CMS), such as OpenText or Documentum;
- Migration of files and folders to Microsoft’s SharePoint, either when initially moving to SharePoint or when upgrading from an older to a newer version of SharePoint;
- Implementing distributed file system (DFS), which manages files and folders across multiple computers;
- Folder restructuring, renaming folders or moving folders to new locations; and
- Repathing files or folders. This often occurs when someone moves files or folders without realizing that many of the files in such folders have links to other files, thus inadvertently breaking links, causing data to be missing from the files containing the links.
LinkFixer Advanced is the world’s only fully automatic solution that can fix broken file links in batch, thousands or even millions at a time, and works on all major file types.
- “72% of UK Financial Services Organizations Believe Data Migration Projects to be Too Risky and Too Costly,” Kognitio, January, 2007. kognitio.com/72-of-uk-financial-services-organisations-believe-data-migration-projects-to-be-too-risky-and-too-costly/.
- McCafferty, Dennis, “The Trillion-Dollar Cost of Downtime and Data Loss,” CIO Insight, January 20, 2015. cioinsight.com/it-management/slideshows/the-trillion-dollar-cost-of-downtime-and-data-loss.html/.
- “Big Data Executive Survey 2013: The State of Big Data in the Large Corporate World,” New Vantage Partners. newvantage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Big-Data-Survey-2013-Summary-Report-090913.pdf.
How To Contact LinkTek
For more information about LinkFixer Advanced, please visit LinkTek’s Web site at www.LinkTek.com, call 727-442-1822, or e-mail linkmail@LinkTek.com.
About LinkTek
LinkTek’s patented product, LinkFixer Advanced, automatically finds and fixes broken links in an organization’s most critical file types so that migrations and file system reorganizations can be completed quickly, accurately and without causing lost data or lost productivity due to broken file links.
Headquartered in Clearwater, Florida, LinkTek Corporation provides the world’s leading solution for the management and automatic repair of file links found in today’s most common file formats. LinkTek’s purpose is to improve the lives of computer users, IT professionals, Records & Information Managers and CIOs by providing software that automatically repairs file links and also protects them from the effects of data migrations and user errors. For more information, visit linktek.com.
For immediate release
For more information about LinkFixer Advanced, please visit LinkTek’s website at https://linktek.com/ or call LinkTek at 727-442-1822.
Try LinkFixer Advanced today!
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