CMSWire: More eDiscovery Scares: Don't Delete Your Email!

CMSWire posted a story summarizing a recent Osterman Research/Fortiva report on eDiscovery trends.

A key “take-away” is that most organizations need some type of archive system in place to minimize the eDiscovery and data storage burden on IT. You can get archiving systems as installed software, a dedicated appliance, or as a hosted service. Choose one that meets all your needs. I think a 100% pure hosted service is the easiest and most cost-effective way the mid-market enterprise should implement archiving.

The following are some highlights from the article. You can read the full text here.

Sponsored by archiving software vendor Fortiva, the study reports that businesses with more than 1,000 employees are averaging 37 legal discovery requests a year, 37 business requests, 25 audit requests, and more than 100 requests per year from end users.

Other notable findings from the survey include:

• One in four businesses surveyed has delayed a business or IT initiative in order to meet legal discovery requirements
• For each discovery request, 58% of the time spent by IT is spent gathering, restoring and searching through backups, while the remainder is spent finding and searching through PST files (25 percent) and searching through the email server (17%).
• On average, businesses keep 24 months’ worth of data on backup tapes.

What enterprises may find surprising, however, is that 75 percent of companies surveyed are still relying on backup tapes to fulfill eDiscovery requests.