Cloud can help speed FOIA response
By Stephanie Kanowitz, GCN, Sept. 7, 2021
The backlog of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests has grown during the pandemic. The Justice Department reports that the number of backlogged requests across federal agencies in fiscal 2020 was 141,762, compared to about 120,000 the year before. The disparate systems that shaped agencies’ quick shift from office to remote work is largely to blame, one expert says.
“In many cases the data that they’re receiving, generating [and] creating is remaining local to the employees instead of on an enterprise system,” said Bill Tolson, vice president of compliance and e-discovery at Archive 360. That makes it difficult for an agency to respond to a FOIA request that involves numerous agency employees with disparate data repositories. “We’ve found instances where many of the employees were storing agency material up in their personal cloud accounts because they had nowhere else to put it.”
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