How Email Archiving and E-Discovery Go Hand in Hand
All businesses have to legally comply with e-discovery requests. This is where the best email archiving solutions come in. Let’s take a look at how these solutions will help you.
1. If You Do Not Meet an E-Discovery Request, You Could Go Bankrupt
If there is no proper archiving solution in place, a lot of time will be wasted on collating data, increasing the risk of missing the deadline. While an email archiving solution costs money, the cost is just a fraction of the penalty for missing a deadline. Considering these programs allow you to find the relevant emails within minutes, it is clear why it should be installed.
2. Any Piece of Communication Can Be Requested by the Opposing Council, with Permission of the Judge
If you do not have an archiving solution in place, you may have to perform a manual search of terabytes of data. There are personal storage spaces, database systems, attachments, emails, and more. Through a good archiving solution, however, you can again simply search for specific keywords, and every relevant piece will be available to you in seconds.
3. If Directed and in Litigation, You Hold Responsibility for the Production, Retention, and Security of Relevant Data
You have to put an archiving solution in place, since you will not be able to put a legal hold on the data without it. Again, this is a legal requirement. Data may have been deleted from machines, which means you will breach your retention obligations. By archiving on the cloud, the legal hold will be properly in place, enabling you to access any and all information as and when needed.
4. The Data Requester Can Specify the Format They Want to See the Data in
It is possible that you receive an e-discovery request that stipulates a certain format. If you don’t have an archiving solution in place, this is a huge headache. With archiving solutions, however, you can easily find all the information you want and transfer it to the format the other party wants.
5. It Can Access Complex Data Like Electronic Voicemails, Social Media, SMS, and IM
Social data is difficult to access unless you have a proper archiving system in place. Without out, your IT staff will have to use publisher-specific methods, proxy methods, application programming interfaces, screenshots, and web crawling systems. When you archive on the cloud, however, the social logs will be stored just as easily as an email and attachment.
We live in an increasingly unstructured electronic world, with data being everywhere. Responding to an e-discovery request, therefore, can become hugely complex, with data coming from so many different angels. With a proper archiving solution in place, and particularly one that is cloud based, you can easily find any and all data that you have a need for. Best of all, through cloud storage, you can even access this information remotely, should you receive an e-discovery request when you are away from the office.