Improve Record Retention & E-Discovery

Being Proactive Can Save SMEs Time & Money

The growing amounts of data in today’s enterprise can be vexing for IT and data center managers. If you don’t keep a close eye on things, data quickly becomes scattered, unorganized, and even costly. And what happens when you need quick access to specific company records or when your data is evidence in a legal case? Record retention and e-discovery can quickly become major challenges for some small to midsized enterprises. Fortunately, there are ways to deal with these challenges. Here are a few tips to help your enterprise modify and improve your storage situation in both of these areas.

Take A Proactive Approach

According to Colby Dyess, the director of product management for Digital Reef (www.digitalreefinc.com), most small and midsized enterprises take a reactive approach to e-discovery. He says this results in constant fire drills to collect potentially responsive information and then “throw it over the fence” to e-discovery service providers for processing and review. “While the service providers have valuable expertise in data handling and hosting, most enterprises turn over way too much information for processing. At upwards of $1,800 per gigabyte for processing, this adds up to a huge expense quickly,” he says. “Worse, IT staff are forced into the manual process of collecting hundreds of gigabytes of unstructured data that happens to be scattered across diverse systems and locations and exists in a variety of digital formats.”

Dyess says that as a result, IT departments have been forced to use multiple tools to collect data under strict timeframes. He says employing a proactive approach helps reduce the risk, cost, and time associated with e-discovery requests.

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Source: processor.com
By: Chris A. MacKinnon