|
In today’s fast-paced, data-driven business world, having the right information at the right time is the difference between success and failure. And, with organizations currently dealing with unprecedented amounts of business-critical data to store yet keep accessible, the challenges of managing information have become even greater. What’s more, this trend is likely to continue, with some experts predicting that organizations will have 50% more information — including email and other unstructured data -- to manage every year.
As a result, information management is now a proximate and pressing business concern. Organizations must ensure that electronic data is routinely backed up, safely stored, and recoverable in the event of a disruption, system outage, or disaster. At the same time, they must also make sure records are preserved and expired in conjunction with retention schedules and are searchable and discoverable to enable efficient response to litigation and investigatory matters.
Today’s advanced backup and intelligent email archiving tools address these challenges, and together form the cornerstone of a proactive information management strategy.
Data Recovery
Backup technology has come a long way since the days of tape-only solutions. Next-generation tools now leverage both disk and tape to enable organizations to automatically and continuously save information and store it on-site for recovery of individual messages or files, as well as to back up large amounts of data enterprise-wide and store it offsite for disaster recovery purposes. The objective of backup tools is to recover data, thereby providing a precaution against the loss or damage of that information.
Today’s most sophisticated backup tools optimize backup and recovery for both disk and tape, giving organizations a single, unified console for managing their many backup and recovery technologies—from snapshots, replication, and virtual tape libraries (VTLs) to deduplication and continuous data protection.
Information Discovery
Archiving technologies help address the challenges of storing, managing, and discovering unstructured information from messaging and collaborative systems and file servers across the enterprise, giving businesses a single information repository that supports litigation activities and automates long-term records retention policies. The ability to proactively organize and control information helps organizations reduce their legal risk and helps them control electronic discovery costs, which are often very high due to the large volume of email messages that must be collected, processed, reviewed, and produced.
Email archiving tools allow organizations to quickly and efficiently implement a legal hold in response to anticipated litigation and can automatically apply legal holds against archived data to ensure that relevant information will not be deleted. By automating this process and removing the legal hold responsibility from individual custodians, an organization protects itself against the possibility of destroying electronic information relevant to a pending matter which can result in sanctions.
New content may be added to the hold automatically during scheduled searches. Then, once a case is closed, holds can be quickly released on a case-by-case basis allowing documents to revert to their originally scheduled deletion dates. This functionality helps alleviate the problem of information being placed on legal hold and then forgotten, creating a backlog of data that never progresses through the information life cycle.
In addition, with an email archiving tool, attorneys and other authorized personnel can conduct searches across all archived content on a case-by-case basis, obviating the need for outsourcing or cumbersome backup tape restoration and accelerating the early case assessment and discovery process. Some organizations have been able to pay for the cost of an entire archiving solution with the cost savings realized from using it for just one legal matter.
Some archiving tools provide automated classification of email by applying context to content, thereby further driving rapid search. Their ability to search metadata and a wide range of files types also aids in streamlining the discovery process and helping counsel meet discovery deadlines.
Email archiving tools also ease review, enabling multiple reviewers to mark items as being relevant or non-relevant to a pending matter. Because these marks can be permanently assigned to a message or group of messages, a privileged message that appeared in another review process would be pre-sorted, alleviating the need for multiple review of the same information.
Furthermore, email archiving helps keep storage costs low. By archiving according to policy, these systems enable organizations to move less frequently used unstructured information from high-cost disk and archive to lower cost storage, while still maintaining accessibility. A growing number of email archiving tools also leverage optimized single instance storage and compression technologies to further reduce the data footprint.
A Unified Platform
One of the most significant technology developments to recently emerge is an information management platform that unifies data protection and archiving, thereby giving organizations a single infrastructure that reduces the complexity and cost of disaster recovery and information discovery. This new approach to information management also enables organizations to customize their backup and archiving environment with tape, disk, or a combination of both.
By utilizing backup tools for recovery together with archiving tools for discovery, organizations can ensure that their data is not only protected but discoverable now and into the future.
For more information, please click here.
|