IT Department Takes on Critical eDiscovery Role

http://ow.ly/61y6g

Article by Christine Taylor appearing on Enterprise Storage Forum's website.

This article discusses the changing dynamics within many corporate IT Departments, and the need to have an IT structure that is more prepared to deal with eDiscovery requests.

The article provides some very useful insight into methods that can be utilized to assist in lowering costs for collecting potentially relevant once litigation arises.  The author provides some very useful steps that should be followed when a lawsuit is reasonably anticipated:

• Step 1: IT receives the preservation request from Legal. Legal has emailed data custodians to preserve messages on desktops and laptops, and IT is responsible for locating email on company backup.


• Step 2: Locate backup catalogs from multiple backup applications.


• Step 3: Search each backup catalog for potentially responsive tapes.


• Step 4: Issue request to off-site vault manager for specific tapes, or go search for them yourself.


• Step 5: Receive and inventory tapes.


• Step 6: Use multiple backup applications to restore data. Provision more storage halfway through. Tear hair out.


• Step 7: Search metadata within date ranges and by custodian. Copy responsive data onto online repository or removable media.


• Step 8: Document the entire procedure for chain-of-custody. Swear you will never do this again as long as you live. Know that you will not be so lucky.

In addition, the lawsuit touches on new technology that can assist with preserving emails more efficiently, for a 90 day time period in an email storage system, then moving emails to back-up tapes.  This technique will enable a corporation to more readily claim that certain data is inaccessible (under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure), and if the opposing side really wants to see the inaccessible data then they will need to discuss cost-shifting for production of any data stored on back-up tape systems.