SaaS And E-Discovery Dangers

Here's how to meet your legal obligations when your data lives in the cloud.

Litigation may be the last thing on IT's mind as it evaluates software-as-a-service options for the enterprise. Unfortunately, litigation and e-discovery--the act of finding, preserving, and analyzing electronic information--are facts of life. If your company gets dragged into a lawsuit and relevant information is stored inside a provider's cloud, you need to know that information is available on demand.

That's why IT should add e-discovery criteria to its list of considerations when evaluating SaaS providers, particularly when looking at services such as hosted e-mail and e-mail archiving, PC and file-share backups, and other information sources that create a legal data trail. No company wants to find that a SaaS application it purchased to streamline operations suddenly has become a major hurdle to its e-discovery obligations.

Fortunately, many of the criteria, including storage and performance, that IT already uses to evaluate SaaS providers can be applied to e-discovery. However, there also are e-discovery-specific requirements that must be considered, such as fine-grained control over retention and disposition of data, and the ability to quickly retrieve information from the service provider's system.

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Source: informationweek.com
By: Kurt Marko