Posts Tagged ‘iron mountain’

With the rise of corporate litigation, eDiscovery requirements are taxing already overextended corporate legal department budgets.  To relieve this budget pressure, corporate legal departments are looking for ways to become more efficient in the eDiscovery process including ESI collection, early case assessment (ECA) and review.

Attend this live webcast to learn how you can employ a proactive eDiscovery strategy to help you significantly reduce your overall litigation preparedness budget while maintaining or exceeding your legal department service levels.

“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.

I just got back from the ILTA show in Las Vegas. I had booth duty most of the time so have little opportunity to scout the show but had several interesting conversations with attendees as they came into the Iron Mountain booth.

Grid computing is a form of distributed computing that involves coordinating and sharing computing, application, data, storage, or network resources across organizations. Grid technologies allow organizations to change the way organizations can deploy and resolve complex archiving deployments. The Iron Mountain NearPoint Multi-Node Grid Architecture is the most scalable architecture in the email archive industry and is provided standard in NearPoint. Utilizing a super-scalar or super-pipelined grid, NearPoint can support systems ranging in size from 100 mailboxes to tens of thousands of mailboxes. A hot-plug modular architecture allows servers and storage to be added or taken away as required, with no downtime. This capability benefits large Exchange environments as well as medium-size environments with high peak demands. Archive storage capacity grows on demand automatically, and default configuration and wizard-driven menus simplify deployment and management.

The legal hold requirement is vastly misunderstood in my opinion. I have run into many corporate counsels that have the opinion;”I just send and email out to anyone in my company that could have responsive ESI asking them to be sure not to delete any data about the following subjects”. Then, if the delete something they shouldn’t have, it’s their neck, not mine or the company’s.

A recent research by Applied Research has shown that almost 90% of organizations see value in having a data plan, however less than half of those actually has a plan in place.  In my experience even the plans that are in place are lacking or inadequate.  A lot of organizations, when they plan for a data retention plan, only think about the obvious, which is tapes and email, however valuable data, or electronic records, are in much more data repositories than many organizations realize. 

It is of my opinion that there are almost zero reasons to legitimately have PST files in a corporate environment and I have been speaking on this topic a few times in the past.  Many people underestimate how bad the problem / infestiation of PST files is in their organization and its erradication can be a long and tricky process actually unless you have adequate tools available for you like Iron Mountain NearPoint and its PST Archiving Option.  On August 10th I will present the latest on how to plan to get rid of PST files.  Learn everything that you need to know about how to tackle such a project.  You can register for the webinar here.

I’ve been in this industry for most of the last decade now and have seen pretty much all the ways archiving products can and have been deployed in organizations. From small to Fortune 500, they all are slightly different in the way their internal IT is being managed and used.  Archiving products can have a big impact on your infrastructure with requirements and there is one particular piece that I’d like to highlight in this post that many forget.

Time and time again we see news stories and legal case writes ups where it has become obvious employees still have no idea that an email is not a private communication. I find most employees, even corporate legal department types, still consider an email is like a verbal conversation in a parking lot; once its ended, it doesn’t exist anymore (unless it was recorded).

The eDiscoveryJournal, recently ran an article about desktop collection for eDiscovery and mentioned the case of Roffe v Eagle Rock, a case involving custodial self-discovery and expectations from the Judge. The transcript from the conversation between the Judge and both parties of the case can be seen here.