Uncovering hidden budget to manage long-term legacy data liability

http://ow.ly/7HROM

An article by Dennis Kiker and Jim McGann on the insidecounsel.com website.

The article provides insight in ways to find methods to reduce legal costs, even when money in the budget to invest in technology does not seem to exist.

The article states, "One area of escalating risk and cost to the enterprise is unmanaged information. Whether resident on seemingly self-propagating data archives, forgotten shared drives or mounting stores of legacy backup tapes, unmanaged information not only accounts for an increasingly large percentage of a company’s IT budget, it also represents an unknown and seemingly unknowable risk. How can legal teams help their clients proactively manage user data within tight budgets and ensure that corporate information management policies are implemented?

Corporate IT departments consume a large portion of the corporate budget, and they also are the teams that manage all user data. Finding money in these already strict budgets and delivering the tools to enable IT to implement policy can seem like insurmountable challenges. However, by leveraging available technologies, a large component of typical IT budgets can be freed up and used to manage long-term liability."


The article further states, "Using technology that can scan legacy tapes and index the information on them, it is possible to identify data relevant to an existing legal preservation obligation and quickly extract that data into a more suitable archive for long-term storage. The balance of the data, typically 90 percent or more, can be quickly and permanently purged, eliminating a hidden source of potential future liability. The cost for the technology and labor required to remediate a store of backup tapes and manage long-term liability is less than the cost to store the tapes annually. In other words, eliminating the hidden risk resident on legacy backup tapes generally will pay for itself—sometimes in a matter of months."

Thus identifying ways to reduce existing expenses, and create new more efficient ways to store information, and remove what does not need to be stored, can more than pay for itself.