Like Billy Pilgrim, in Kurt Vonnegutt’s Slaughterhouse Five, I sometimes become “unstuck in time.” So it was that I recently came across an article I wrote in early 2019. Oops, that’s five years from now. I really need to clean up my filing system… Still, it did catch my attention, and since it deals with courts of the future, which is also the theme of this week’s NACM conference, I thought it would be a timely blog topic.
In the 2019 piece, I was looking back, reflecting on the time when just about everyone involved in court document and record management assumed that there was no way court documents and records would ever be stored largely “in the Cloud”:
Back in those days [2014], it went without saying that there was no level of security that could be high enough to justify putting critical, sensitive court documents and records “at risk” in some virtual, remote “place.” In fact, a lot of courts didn’t even have to consider it because their statutes and regulations required physical storage within the geographical jurisdiction.
In 2019, it’s as hard for people to understand how anyone could have ever considered “local” storage and management of court documents and records to be more secure as it had been in 2014 to believe that anyone ever thought that courts were the only viable source of court systems software development. Both, of course, were making the same mistake.
Those involved in court technology management in 2014 sometimes failed to appreciate that the technologies and products then available and required for state-of-the-art court systems software HAD NOT BEEN AVAILABLE 20 or even 10 years earlier. For that reason, in the 1980s and 1990s, in-house court software development was, in many cases, the best practice. By 2014, though, it had become technically, financially and politically difficult and risky for courts to attempt in-house software development and maintenance.
Likewise, in 2019, people often forget what the security landscape looked like in the first decade of the millennium. The Internet often resembled the 19th century Wild West. The safest place to keep your data was completely separate.
Of course, over the not-so-long haul, that method worked about as well as keeping your money safe by stuffing it in the mattress. In order for the information to actually be useful, it couldn’t be kept totally separate. So much for security based on isolation.
In 2019, of course, everyone understands that the ONLY real security for court data is in the Cloud. Nowhere else are the tools, infrastructure and oversight either sophisticated enough or cost-effective enough to adequately protect critical, sensitive information. Five to 10 years ago, those tools and that infrastructure were still in development, which is why court record managers of the time could be forgiven for trying variations of mattress-stuffing. Today, in 2019, we are thankfully past all that and our court records are all the more secure for it.
Now, the reason this little piece caught my eye (even though I shouldn’t have seen it for another five or six years) is the part about statutes and regulations requiring local storage of court records. Technology and security aside, there are some pretty compelling arguments (and certainly a lot of emotional desire) for requiring records and data to be locally stored. Fortunately, even today, that is no barrier to cloud storage. Robust Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems already provide the capability to specify storage in close geographical proximity to courts anywhere in the country.
As courts implement their ECM solutions in good ol’ 2014, they probably ought to pay attention to whether their solution could, one day in the future, be migrated to the Cloud. Not that anyone’s suggesting it, mind you! Just sayin’.
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