* Electronic discovery to drive storage consolidation
In the last few years, many legal cases have hinged on a forgotten, incriminating e-mail that was pulled out of a mountain of electronic evidence. As enterprise data is increasingly digitized, a large portion of a company’s information is in electronic form, hence the importance of electronic discovery or “e-discovery.” Planning for e-discovery is necessary to reduce the cost and potential liability of companies. Storage consolidation is a key piece of that strategy.
Usually a subpoena triggers discovery, but increasingly, the courts are expecting companies to initiate retention and evidence-preservation procedures as soon as they become aware of legal proceedings. Companies facing litigation have to manage two problem areas related to e-discovery: Penalties for failing to preserve evidence can be enormous, and the costs of complying with e-discovery may be very large.
Here are the steps that enterprises need to consider when planning for e-discovery:
* Courts are expecting a level of due diligence in the company policies for retention of documents – “our retention policy elapsed” is not a good excuse for a failure to produce evidence.
* Failure to produce requested evidence can land company executives on the wrong side of a contempt-of-court ruling.
* Collecting requested evidence can be very costly – companies cannot keep data “online” indefinitely, so they need to plan for e-discovery as part of their storage, archiving, retention and information-lifecycle policies.
* If a company’s storage systems are widely distributed, it becomes increasingly costly to search and collect evidence from all the various locations (direct-attached storage in branches, e-mail servers, databases, etc.).
Storage consolidation has accelerated because of potential cost savings and the need to demonstrate compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. E-discovery adds one more reason for storage consolidation: Companies with centralized storage can search, audit and collect data far more cheaply in response to e-discovery.
Furthermore, retention and archiving policies are easier to define and implement if storage is more centralized. Finally, e-discovery can be implemented more cheaply if it is seen as an extension of enterprise document retention, archiving, backup and off-site storage policies.
The paperless office will not be implemented any time soon, but the increasing digitization of enterprise data means that e-discovery will be a permanent fixture in the future of corporate litigation. By preparing in advance of such litigation, companies can save money, reduce the impact on daily operations – and reduce the chance of people going to jail. If the first two are not reason enough to motivate IT executives, the threat of punitive fines and jail time should be.
