Archive for the ‘Compliance’ Category

“A recent proposal will mandate the current and future governors of New York to use an email archiving solution that will offer permanent access to important documents, the Times Union reports.

The most recent proposal marks the second-consecutive year New York lawmakers have passed legislation that creates more strict regulations forcing governors to submit emails to state archives. The bill’s proponents have stressed the historical benefits of integrating a government email archiving solution.

Many (but not all) corporate legal types consider ESI retention management as the legal hold process. Not a bad thought but really falls short of a true corporate definition of the term. To records managers ESI retention management refers to the systematic retention and disposition of the organizations electronic business records; either for the day to day running of the business, regulatory compliance or litigation support. And in this case I believe the records managers are right.

Back on December 30, 2009 I blogged about how cloud storage could have a problem catching on with larger enterprises because of a lesser known provision in the Patriot Act called the National Security Letters.

The acquisition of Mimosa Systems by Iron Mountain last February was a big piece of the puzzle in Iron Mountains’ digital strategy –  dubbed Digital 2.0.   This acquisition also brought changes for me personally.  In my new role at Iron Mountain I am going to focus on evangelizing the Digital 2.0 vision and product set, a task that I’m both exited about and also don’t underestimate.  For quite a few people, Iron Mountain is the company that moves those boxes in trucks they see driving around. You see them in New York, London and Amsterdam, etc.  For many though, it has largely gone unnoticed that Iron Mountain has been building up a major set of digital offerings for customers, from online backup of PCs and Servers to digital archiving and even technology escrow management.

The last few days I’ve been in the Boston area with my fellow Mimosa Systems blogger Bill Tolson visiting and talking to our new coworkers are Iron Mountain.  I’m very excited about what is coming in the future for us and our customers.   Iron Mountain isn’t just one of the largest trucking company around (3200 trucks) and stores 600 million boxes with an average of 1,200 files each.   On the digital side there are also some impressive offerings and features.

A new Act is in the works for Federal Agencies called the H.R. 1387: Electronic Message Preservation Act.   Right now this bill has only been approved last week by the House of Representatives and might see some changes before it goes through the senate however the current bill is pretty clear on the requirements of that Federal agencies will have to comply with within a pretty short time after the bill will go in effect. Archiving and eDiscovery searches are pretty clearly defined.

First of all, many of you are wondering what RBS is.  Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is an API that is available as an add-on feature pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express.  It is designed to actually move the storage of binary large objects (BLOBs) from costly storage on database servers to cheaper storage solutions and is also available as  such for SharePoint Portal Server.  The advantages of RBS are that it can save you a significant amount of storage space, conserves hardware resources and allows the end user transparent access to their data.

As with much in this  industry many things are referred to with different phrases or acronyms.  Earlier this week I read an interesting question on one of the discussion lists that I follow and the question was if the process of legal holds would also apply for pending or reasonably assumed investigations by regulatory agencies.

In my previous blog I exposed the naked truth about Exchange deleted items and how easy it is to destroy potential email records. 

Microsoft must have listened because the new version Exchange 2010 includes substantial improvements to the “dumpster” and deleted item behavior and closed the potential “leak” for eDiscovery.

The new Exchange 2010 dumpster is a complete new design.  Here is a link if you want the complete story.

To fully understand email discovery with Microsoft Exchange Server, you need to understand how the deleted item process works.  Here is a quick summary.

For Exchange 2007 and earlier versions, deleted email is moved to the deleted folder.  Once the deleted folder is emptied, the email moves into a system folder called the “dumpster”.  Email remains in the dumpster for a time determined by the Admin.  Typically this is 7 days.  After 7 days, the email is permanently removed from Exchange.