Press

CLEARWATER, FL (February 23, 2015) — IT managers in the financial sector are facing 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 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 (http://www.linktek.com/) 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 (http://www.linktek.com/excel/broken-links-in-excel/) 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 that 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 (http://www.linktek.com/company/about-us/) — 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—and, consequently, to perform data migrations—has become a 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.”

LinkFixerAdvanced economically, safely and rapidly protects and maintains file links during a wide variety of data migrations, saving financial institutions money and time. This includes:

●   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 and causing data to be missing from the files containing the links.
LinkFixer Advanced is the world’s only fully automatic fixer of broken file links; it handles batches of thousands or even millions at a time, and works on all major file types.

For more information about LinkTek and its link-protection software, visit www.LinkTek.com.

About LinkTek
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 was created by Axiom founder David Greenbaum, who recognized that one concept behind Axiom’s MicroStation plug-ins applied to almost every major file type; he then designed the world’s first fully-automatic link-repairing software, dubbed LinkFixerPlus. Since its unveiling in October, 2002, LinkFixerPlus has been recognized for its new and innovative technology, creating a whole new category of software. LinkTek has continued to perfect its product; LinkFixer Advanced is the next evolution up from LinkFixerPlus, and the patented software surpasses its predecessor in terms of speed and data capacity. LinkTek’s purpose is to improve the lives of computer users, IT departments, IT professionals, Records & Information Managers and CIOs by providing software that automatically repairs file links, while also protecting them from the effects of data migrations and user errors. For more information, visit www.LinkTek.com.

1.   “72% of UK Financial Services Organizations Believe Data Migration Projects to be Too Risky and Too Costly.” kognitio.com/72-of-uk-financial-services-organisations-believe-data-migration-projects-to-be-too-risky-and-too-costly/.

2.   “The Trillion-Dollar Cost of Downtime and Data Loss.” cioinsight.com/it-management/slideshows/the-trillion-dollar-cost-of-downtime-and-data-loss.html/.

3.   “Big Data Executive Survey 2013: The State of Big Data in the Large Corporate World.” newvantage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Big-Data-Survey-2013-Summary-Report-090913.pdf.