Email Discovery Technology has Advanced. Has eDiscovery Strategy?
Would you be today, as a company, able to answer an eDiscovery request in less than 24 hours? Probably not. As we recently saw, eDiscovery compliance is becoming an increasing issue for many companies.
Piper Jaffray was fined $700,000 by FINRA,
MetLife had to pay $1.2 million. What was the reason? Failure to archive email.
I stumbled upon a
survey done by InformationWeek. The survey itself is a little dated but I think the results and the conclusions that can be drawn from them are still relevant today. The survey was taken on 864 business technology professionals and covered a number of questions regarding E-mail Discovery:
• 50% of the respondents acknowledge that they had to
search email at an executive request.
• 47% had to search email for an
internal investigation.
• 31% of Emails had to be retrieved due to
compliance/audit issues.
• 30% had to recover emails due to
litigation.
• Last, but not least, 24% of respondents conceded that they
had to restore emails from tape to conduct a search for litigation, compliance/audit, or other investigatory purposes.
The numbers show that an email archiving system with strong eDiscovery capabilities can be a strong asset to a company's IT strategy, if not an essential one. A simple, fast email discovery solution could save a company time and money by speeding up the search process and saving
man-hours wasted on old electronic discovery technology. Lacking an email archive altogether could, at worst, put a company out business if, for any number of the reasons above, it is required to provide accurate email discovery in an allowed timeframe. The nearly one quarter of respondents who had to search through backup tapes is perhaps the most interesting. Greg Arnette wrote a post describing
the nightmare of having to search through backup tapes. In his post, Greg describes how companies were spending
over 12 hours to search through half of an email archive on backup tapes. This seems foolish knowing that technology has caught up, and now you can
complete electronic discovery searches in under a second, as demonstrated in
this video. When you think about it, it seems insane for a company to be fined millions of dollars simply because it was unable able to provide emails, knowing that they are stored somewhere, but unable to locate them.
The conclusion? Companies should make the jump, upgrade, and integrate a hosted email archiving solution into their IT strategy. Offloading this headache to third-party email archiving provider would allow IT departments to focus more on business-related IT issues and give organizations the opportunity to run their companies without worrying about eDiscovery.
Download the Free White Paper: Why Use Cloud-Powered Hosted Email Archiving, In it, you will find the answers to: Why you should archive your content? Why hosted archiving makes sense? and What are the key issues to consider in selecting a vendor?
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