Iron Mountain raises the bar for eDiscovery

Across all industries and among organizations of all shapes and sizes, increasing numbers of email messages are being sent and received—an estimated volume of 156 email messages per day per mailbox. The content contained in these messages is used for improving business communications, enhancing customer satisfaction, and maintaining a competitive edge in today’s business environment. This deluge of email communication has created an enormous challenge and risk to businesses which must manage the content that email contains for legal discovery (internal legal audits and investigations) and overall corporate governance.

There are a growing number of regulations in addition to the ones already in existence (Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), FINRA, and Graham-Leech-Bliley Act) that dictate the need to preserve email for record keeping. Increased regulatory scrutiny and fines imposed on the financial services industry in 2002 caused the initial push to manage and preserve email data for compliance. A second major market driver is now emerging for email retention, which is the need to manage and preserve email for legal discovery. Legal requests to search email come from external civil legal proceedings, and frequently from internal requests.

A common example of internal drives is an HR manager who needs to search email sent between two employees who are suspected of passing offensive information. According to a recent survey by Osterman Research, 75% of organizations have been ordered to produce email in litigation. In the same survey, it was found that 74% of organizations surveyed have had to rely on backup tapes, local message stores, etc. to retrieve emails in response to a request from the in-house legal department.

Facing an increasing number of internal and external requests to retrieve email data, organizations have no choice but to pay the added cost of searching backup tapes or invest in an email archival solution to manage historical email data for discovery. In an ESG report, the cost to search backup tapes was estimated between $1,500 and $3,000 per tape, in 2010, it is now closer to $4000 per tape. For a typical discovery of a mid- to

large-sized organization, thousands of tapes can be involved, so the total cost of discovery based on backup tapes can be in the millions. As a result, the cost of one discovery can be an order of magnitude greater than the cost of an email archival solution. This is strong financial incentive to invest in email archiving and avoid the high cost of searching backup tapes and custodian storage spaces.

Iron Mountain Digital raises the bar for legal discovery of Electronic Stored Information. It delivers improvements for all the major steps of eDiscovery versus traditional methods for managing Exchange Servers and offers an unmatched solution set for capturing, preserving, and  processing the huge amount of electronic information contained in Exchange Server for eDiscovery. For support of unplanned in-house discovery as well as support of major law suits involving external counsel, the Iron Mountain eDiscovery solution set makes discovery fast and thorough. Performing searches without IT involvement, multiple reviewers can collaborate on searches, share results and tag messages for later review.  At each step along the way, search accuracy is guaranteed by the measures to preserve authenticity. Complete capture of information, whether it’s done by an archiving solution or an on-premise appliance, Iron Mountain has the solution set for you.