Local, state, and federal regulators and the courts expect organizations to produce a wide range of documents upon request. Various types of ESI from different sources must be discoverable and made available in the required format. As a consequence, organizations must have archiving solutions that provide capability and flexibility to:
Effective electronic data archiving means controlling data in line with compliance, discovery, privacy, and security requirements and organizational governance policies, while ensuring that all relevant data can be searched and retrieved quickly. A true archiving system (versus reliance on server backups and various storage devices) is the only vehicle with the explicit capabilities needed for timely search and retrieval of discoverable data; namely, the capability to:
Most organizations are faced with increasingly unmanageable exponential growth of their ESI. This constant growth requires the ongoing purchase of increasingly larger capacity storage devices in order to save every single email, attachment, file system, MS SharePoint, and social media post, as well other electronic information subject to retention requirements. With a piecemeal and “on the verge of being outgrown” storage approach, organizations are subject to increasing risks and costs from eDiscovery and/ or regulatory audit requests. As a result, organizations need an archive system capable of:
Organizations must preserve their content over a period of time for compliance reasons and to mitigate risks. Consequently, archived data is preserved with clearly defined retention periods. At the end of the defined retention period, expired data is usually deleted unless an organization is compelled to continue to preserve that data by a court or a local, state, or federal regulator. In the event of a preservation order requiring data to be put on hold, the original retention timeline (as defined by an organization’s retention rules) for content placed in these data holds needs to be superseded indefinitely. In order to handle both defined retention periods and preservation requests requiring indefinite data holds, a data archiving system must be capable of:
Any content placed in an email and other electronic data archiving system needs to be safe and secure yet readily available. Unauthorized access to enterprise information can lead to costly damages. In fact, failure of any component of a data archiving system can lead to serious problems for an organization. To achieve necessary security and reliability, a data archiving system must be capable of: