eDiscovery is the monster that ate Cleveland and email is the most significant volume of ESI in eDiscovery, and IDC “estimates that as much as 60% of this business-critical information is stored in email and other electronic messaging tools” and as result “email archives as they not only work to protect organizations from compliance and litigation risk.” Commvault recently issued a report entitled “7 Reasons to Worry About Your Current Email Archiving Strategy” which includes these comments about #6 “You Can’t Discover Data Quickly”:
Discovery costs for litigation and compliance events can be exorbitant, especially if your legacy archive solution doesn’t support intuitive search functionality. Given that over 55 percent of organizations have been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce email, the cost of eDiscovery is likely to hit your organization.
To best assure compliance and eDiscovery, you must
1) be certain you’ve archived all pertinent information;
2) assure that you’ve used defensible deletion best practices for the content you no longer retain;
3) be ready to quickly and easily search enterprise-wide to discover all needed Electronically Stored Information (ESI) in a comprehensive and documented way.
Here’s a list of all 7 Reasons:
- You’re Collecting and Storing Everything.
- You’re Keeping It All Forever.
- You Can’t Control Your PSTs.
- Your Archive Isn’t Cloud-Ready.
- Your Employees Can’t Access Content Themselves.
- You Can’t Discover Data Quickly.
- You’re Not Leveraging the Value in Your Archived Data.
Good advice to every litigant, but the Report is not only directed at eDiscovery but also “insight that can transform business productivity.”