A lot of organizations still lack a managed solution to archive employee emails, let alone policies and procedures to enforce any email archiving principles. Email is the most litigation-risky archive, the number one place for law enforcement agencies and regulators.
Being unprepared for litigation is one of the largest business risks and can seriously threaten the continuity of an organization.
Archiving, managing and enforcing email can be a complex task. From a technical or disk-space-saving point of view, it is not difficult to archive emails, but when e-discovery and early case assessment become a reality and deadlines are imposed on your organization, even products from recognized email-archiving leaders can come with serious problems.
For example, exploratory search for early case assessment and processing large collections of email in a defensible and auditable way can be a significant challenge. Only with the right technology and by creating a daily operating procedure can this be done in a scalable, reliable and cost-effective manner.
Archiving and managing your email is just the beginning. The continuously growing volume and complexity of information, the world-wide distribution of information (due to subsidiaries, outsourcing partners, personal computer and communication equipment and the cloud), increased complexity, and contradicting regulations all contribute to increasing litigation risks and corresponding legal cost.
The only real method to become litigation ready is to have an Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) strategy in place for all your information: including email, file shares, business repositories, paper, but also multimedia information and information the cloud.
Such a strategy should include policy and retention management, content analytics for automatic information dispatching and archiving, classification and valuation, exploratory search, eDiscovery support, defensible and enforced quality control, methodologies and audits, but also meta-data, security and storage management.
