Strategic Data Preparation
from FMDC
A cost effective approach to retrieving and preparing legacy data for litigation and regulatory response
As the volume of electronically stored information (ESI) grows, so do the challenges and costs of managing and retrieving it. Yet it is common for organizations to overlook this concern until they are summoned to address it either for litigation or by regulatory agencies. Typically under these circumstances companies find themselves unprepared and are often confronted by overwhelming problems and exorbitant costs. The stories of companies spending thousands of dollars to access data on media that operates only on antiquated equipment or digging through mountains of backup tapes only to discover there was nothing relevant to find are all too frequent.
The Strategic Data Preparation service from FMDC will help prepare your organization to address these potential problems in a controlled environment at a fraction of the cost and without the panic.
Strategic Data Preparation
The recent (December 2006) court-developed ESI Rules have driven responsible organizations to reexamine their ESI storage strategies and make it clear that they need to have their electronic records under control and their active business records, no mater how old, accessible.
ESI Rules now mandate that companies respond to requests for discovery in litigation. At minimum companies must be able to describe their data, its location, the systems needed to access it as well as the names of the custodians responsible for it, typically the time frames given for response are minimal. Concessions may be made for "inaccessible" information relieving the responding party from the duty to produce if the task to produce is burdensome or costly. However, concessions are not foolproof, if the requesting party can sufficiently argue potential relevance of the information, then even though the information is inaccessible; the responding party may be given a court order to respond.
Current storage strategies often exacerbate the problem. Long term retention of backup tapes preserves unnecessary redundant copies of data that are stored creating haystack after haystack to be searched. The blended nature of the data on backup tapes makes it nearly impossible to selectively manage end-of-life retention. Storage limits on e-mail systems cause users to randomly save old or unused e-mails in .pst files scattered across desktops and laptops throughout the enterprise. If the data is on those laptops, it is potentially discoverable and the user of the laptop may need to be identified to the court as a custodian.
The Strategic Data Preparation service from FMDC guides you through attacking these problems head-on. The approach is a three step process that,
- Develops a catalogue of ESI locations and contents. Unlike a full data conversion, this is a cost effective examination of a company's ESI to categorize its content. It eliminates the need to convert the data unless it is either required or desirable to do so.
- Analyzes the content catalogue to determine data and or media that 1) should be managed, 2) can be eliminated or 3) should be made easily and inexpensively accessible.
- Builds a carefully designed archive to manage the portion of the data that has a high probability of being requested for investigation. The process begins building that archive with the higher risk data.
This process is implemented in a proactive nature that allows planning and timing to minimize costs. If you are concerned with high cost and the potential risk of your current response to requests, FMDC can help you take the cost and risk out of ESI management.