Shining a light on Data Archiving and eDiscovery
Are you and your data scared of the Dark?
Shining a light on Data Archiving and eDiscovery.
If you’ve been storing large volumes of data and your “closet” is dark, dank and jam-packed with large piles of boxes (literal or figurative) it might be time to consider shining a torch into those dark depths. Dark data is, among other things, often the information that legal counsel has demanded you retain as part of your corporate records. There is a way to shine a light on that darkness however and that is by properly utilizing long-term hosted data archiving and eDiscovery solutions.
Dark data can be as overwhelmingly scary as any horror movie you’ve ever sat through. Data consumes large volumes of storage space and a significant amount of your IT resources. It is almost certainly a factor in driving up your eDiscovery costs when the time comes to search that data.
Cleaning up your dark data is a critical but cost-effective process. Information Management should include determining what you have, what might be duplicate, what is expired and what, if anything, can be disposed of. This of course is one of the many disputed questions when it comes to dark data because general advice from legal counsel is often “never delete anything” even after you may have just gone through a costly process to determine what is disposable. (This of course is what results in your “closet” full of content in the first place!) Counsel is motivated by a fear of disposing of content that might be potentially relevant in legal proceedings while organizations are motivated to find cost savings through effective data management.
What to do then? Do you go ahead and clean out your closet and risk legal exposure or do you purchase petabytes of data at extreme cost and attempt to manage and retrieve information from it? Your long-term solution just might lie in the similarly named, “long term hosted archives.” Safer than back-up tapes and more cost-effective than spinning disks, long term hosted archives can hold your ESI (electronically stored information) securely and at significantly lower costs per gigabyte. From an eDiscovery perspective this information can be accessed remotely and moved, copied, stored or simply searched without ever impacting the metadata in any way. In this way you can clean out the cobwebs and scary “dark data” from the closet without “scaring” your legal counsel.
Please share this information with your colleagues and send us your questions, comments and feedback to: waynes@flexnet.com . Additionally, to learn more about our eDiscovery and Email Archiving solutions, please click here or you can find more about our ediscovery and information governance resources go to our web site at www.flexnetsoftware.com and we look forward to answering any questions you may have; please contact us at 1 (800) 263-8733
Shining a light on Data Archiving and eDiscovery.