e-Discovery Preparedness

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Next Monday marks the second anniversary of the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). The amendments clarified that companies must retain all corporate records, including email and data compilations, and make them available to the court as soon as there is a reasonable expectation that a lawsuit might occur, without the court having to specifically make a discovery request. In the passing years have organizations adequately prepared to follow FRCP?

Earlier this month Proofpoint, Inc., a provider of unified email security, archiving and data loss prevention solutions, released survey findings that found that despite regulations and high profile court cases, some IT professionals are still not taking email archiving needs seriously. The September 2008 survey, which was conducted by Osterman Research on behalf of Proofpoint and included 130 IT managers and executives who manage an average of 17,000 email users, found:

• Nearly 60 percent of respondents do not have an email archiving solution in place and 15 percent do not have plans to deploy one.
• More than one in three (39 percent) companies surveyed had been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email in the past 12 months alone.
• Previous Osterman research (April 2008) has found that nearly two-thirds of organizations have been ordered to produce employee email or instant messages at some point, while a slightly higher percentage have referred back to email archives or backups to support their innocence in a legal case.

“It is shocking to see such a high percentage of enterprises that have not yet deployed an archiving solution and even more troubling to see that some have no plans for deployment. Recent legal cases, including the one involving Larry Ellison and Oracle, should be reason enough to make sure a solution is in place to meet e-Discovery demands,” says Sandra Vaughan, senior vice president of marketing and products for Proofpoint. “Unfortunately, it will take more cases and lost time and money before some organizations realize that they are putting themselves at serious risk by not adopting a technology solution to help preserve email records and produce email in a timely manner.”

The company offers its Proofpoint Email Archiving, which it describes as an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use SaaS hybrid email archiving solution for e-Discovery, regulatory compliance and email storage management.

Earlier this month, Mimosa Systems, which offers Live Content Archiving solutions, announced that its Mimosa NearPoint has integrated with NetApp storage and data management solutions. The companies say the integration provides enhanced archiving control and protection on several NetApp technologies, including NetApp SnapManager for SQL Server, SnapDrive, SnapMirror, and FlexVol. This joint solution simplifies management of the messaging and archive environments and enables NetApp’s cascading Snapshot copies approach for archive data protection. According to the announcement, the resulting combination allows customers to deploy smaller storage footprints for their email archives, improve their archive recovery times, and reduce their associated archive management costs.

“Our customers are increasingly challenged with efficiently storing, protecting, and managing the ongoing business risks stemming from the tremendous quantity of email and file information created by today’s information workers,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions marketing for NetApp. “Together, NetApp and Mimosa have partnered to develop an integrated solution that helps our customers address these issues when archiving their vital information.”

For more on e-Discovery, be sure to save the date of December 10, when Messaging News will offer a webinar: Understanding Today’s e-Discovery Challenge that reviews common mistakes and misconceptions about messaging archive, regulations, and e-Discovery. Arthur Riel, Atempo Digital Archive product manager at Atempo, Inc. will be the featured speaker along with me, Stephanie Jordan. Registration is available now.