Entries categorized under “Litigation Readiness”

Companies who execute Information Governance plans are looking for eDiscovery products supporting Early Case Assessment (ECA). ECA is a combination of search, workflow management, information processing, and multilingual user interfaces. ECA requires a cohesive set of technology, business and data science stakeholders to select products. ECA is powerful business process, but identifying ECA products is a beleaguering task. ECA mashes together eDiscovery and technology requirements. The "mashing of requirements" creates a broad matrix of products and functionality. Without question, eDiscovery has significantly evolved within the last few years. (read more)

On average most mid-sized companies are not bothering with Information Management as a means to mitigate e-discovery costs. That is a conclusion reached by comparing Symantec's 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey announced in October 2011 with the research completed by King and Spalding, LLP for the Duke Law Journal December 2010. (read more)

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and data storage providers alike have become almost transfixed by storage system features that control storage capacity growth. Yet there are SMBs that possess applications such as medical imaging, healthcare records and video surveillance who need storage solutions that prioritize data life cycle management over controlling data growth. It is these SMBs who stand to benefit the most from Imation's recent acquisition of ProStor Systems and its InfiniVault platform. (read more)

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and data storage providers alike have become almost transfixed by storage system features that control storage capacity growth. Yet there are SMBs that possess applications such as medical imaging, healthcare records and video surveillance who need storage solutions that prioritize data life cycle management over controlling data growth. It is these SMBs who stand to benefit the most from Imation's recent acquisition of ProStor Systems and its InfiniVault platform. (read more)

Over the years big data has crept into the everyday life of systems administrators. Attempts to solve the big data problem in both block and file storage emerged as data management software. While data management software struggled to get a footing, deduplication and compression took off stunting data management software's growth. Deduplication and compression technologies have well known capabilities in both the storage and information disciplines. However, they differ in a significant way. These technologies do not ease the burden of information management. (read more)

Email is certainly not "out" as an information source when it comes to doing eDiscovery but structured and unstructured content are definitely "in" as the new primary information sources that global companies access when responding to an eDiscovery request. That is just one of the conclusions reached in Symantec's 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey announced today that was based on feedback from 2,000 global enterprises and released today. But even as companies change what internal information sources they access during eDiscovery requests, many remain ill-equipped to deal with it. (read more)

"The debate is over. Social media has become the Internet." Those comments kicked off my conversation with Symantec's Director of Product Marketing, Sean Regan, as we discussed the results of a Social Media Protection Flash Poll that Symantec released yesterday. Among its many findings, social media is rapidly gaining momentum in enterprises as an accepted way to communicate even though IT is still in the early stages of making social media safe for enterprises to use. (read more)

It's easy for those new to VMware, or even for those who have used VMware for awhile, to assume that all VMware backup solutions provide similar functionality. While it might be true to say that all of these solutions protect VMs, their similarities in many cases end there. Among their differences, two of the largest focus on how they manage VMware backups and the ensuing archives that are created which is where software like VizionCore's vRanger Pro stands out. (read more)

Last week's blog took a look at the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. This week I wanted to step even further back and reflect upon the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 regardless of when they were written as I find this insightful in two ways. It lets me know what information continues to hold the attention of readers on as well as what topics from the past might become new trends in 2010. So while there is definitely some overlap between the two, there are also some entries that appear on this list that knock some of the top 10 blogs from last week off the list. (read more)

Smart managers always put a large emphasis on automating whatever processes they can within their organizations and for good reasons: processes become more predictable, there is a reduced chance of human error and ultimately the business is more successful. However businesses are finding out that it may not be in their best interest to automate data classification and that for now courts still prefer people to computers when it comes to performing this particular task. (read more)

A recent report from Ferris Research estimates that the total number of business e-mails sent in North America alone will surpass 139 million in 2009 and 143 million in 2010. This volume of email growth continues to put pressure on IT staff in every size organization to manage its inflow, outflow and retention. While the mechanics of managing emails inflows and outflows can be fairly straightforward, when it comes to setting policies as to how long to retain these emails, the picture can start to get a bit hazy. (read more)

"There is no truth if you cannot find relevant evidence and, unless companies get their eDiscovery act together, eDiscovery is about to destroy the American System of Justice as we know it." That statement summarizes the opening remarks that Ralph Losey, the noted eDiscovery attorney of FloridaLawFirm.com, made during a recent presentation. From there, he went on to explain why he believes most organizations - public or private, large or small - have no viable strategy for eDiscovery and why a reactive approach to eDiscovery is putting the viability of the American System of Justice as we know it at risk. (read more)

In 1978 the Presidential Records Act (PRA) was passed which fundamentally changed the landscape of Presidential records by moving them from a classification of personal information to the public domain. The PRA is explicit in describing that retention of records created by the President of the United States as well as the Vice President is the responsibility of the President. The PRA guides the President in how records should be handled and guides the steps in the proper destruction of records and how they are retained to comply with this federal statute. (read more)

Matt Kesner, the CTO of Fenwick and West and who runs the computer forensics group within that firm, even goes so far to say in a recent Symantec eDiscovery virtual round table that organizations who use social networking have lost control and it can seem sort of hopeless to get your arms around this new form of electronically stored content. But what is happening in response to this new wave of social networking is that some organizations are making employees responsible for the content they create on these Web 2.0 sites and instructing them to act as their own records managers. (read more)

A just released March 2009 Nielsen Company report, Global Faces and Networked Places, makes some startling observations about the rapid adoption of social networking such as blogs, social media sites (Facebook), Twitter and wikis among Internet users. While many may intuitively suspect that the adoption rate of these forms of social networking is accelerating, this report removes all doubt. It highlights that two-thirds of the world's Internet population now utilize social media sites, traffic to these sites is growing at 3x the rate of other Internet traffic and people now spend 10% of all Internet time on social networking sites. (read more)

A recent virtual eDiscovery roundtable that I participated in highlighted the difficulties that companies are having in getting their arms around the proliferation of electronically stored information (ESI) in their organization. This is especially true when one considers the growth of social media and how it can negatively impact them going forward. One attorney participating in the roundtable even went so far to say that, "We have lost control in regards to blogs, wikis and newer forms of social media." Thankfully the news is a little bit better in regards to the management of older, more mature forms of social media such as email but challenges still remain. (read more)

I had a friendly, yet disturbing, conversation with an acquaintance who happens to be a local bankruptcy attorney and trustee. (Boy, how his world has changed recently.) We started off just catching up (my business - not so good; his business - unfortunately very good). The conversation then moved to a local bank that had recently been shut down by the FDIC, and how the ramifications of its failure are being felt by individuals and businesses. (read more)

Over the last few months DCIG has spent fair amount of time researching and documenting specific reasons why tape will not die. Green IT is the one reason we most often hear cited for retaining tape, though new disk-based deduplication and replication technologies coupled with new disk storage system designs that are based on grid storage architectures can offset some of those concerns. So before organizations think that after 30, 90 or 180 days that they should immediately move their archival and backup data, deduplicated or otherwise, from disk to tape just to save money, there are certain intangible savings from an eDiscovery perspective that keeping data on disk provides that are not always feasible on tape. (read more)

A recent DCIG blog entry called into question the value of Bear Stearns selection of Orchestria and its inability to detect the alleged illegal activities of two of its Asset Management portfolio managers. More specifically, it asked why Orchestria did not detect the illegal activities of these individuals and why Bear Stearns did not configure it to monitor for these activities in the first place. The blog posting prompted a comment and phone call from Alan Morley, one of the individuals formerly responsible for implementing and managing Orchestria at Bear Stearns and why monitoring, detecting and preventing this activity is not as easy as it sounds. (read more)

Recently, I had a passing conversation with an attorney about FRCP and as we were talking, he kept bringing up areas that concerned him. So I asked him, "What is your biggest eDiscovery concern?" Without hesitation he replied, "Having a judge issue 'Death Instructions'." (read more)

The recent announcement that CA acquired Orchestria to extend its identity and access management portfolio to include data loss prevention raises some key questions about exactly what problems CA hopes to solve. While DCIG sees the value in companies acquiring and merging with other companies to solve specific strategic problems, this one left us scratching our heads a bit. After all, wasn't it Bear Stearns who back in 2005 selected Orchestria to oversee its electronic communications? But now, in the light of day, really how much benefit did its implementation of Orchestria provide Bear Stearns in light of its recent public failure? (read more)

Responding to an eDiscovery request is definitely not a task that most enterprise organizations eagerly anticipate. But the pain of an eDiscovery is often a result of poorly written or non-existent internal policies and procedures. An organization that takes the time to put internal policies and procedures in place may not only avoid this scenario but also lower its overall cost of doing an eDiscovery. (read more)

The portability and high capacity of flash drives is creating headaches for many companies. The Net is swarming with stories of the ill-use, illegal activities, and security concerns as more and more of these devices are lost and stolen or used to steal sensitive information. There are two basic categories of threats to information when corporations allow the free-will use of flash drives within an organization: the introduction of viruses, and the potential for lost or stolen data. (read more)

As analysts within the electronically stored information (ESI) space, DCIG pays close attention to not only features and benefits of specific products and solutions but also monitors other articles, blogs, and columns in the broader market place about specific vendors. In instances where allegations are made, it then tries to sort fact from fiction and present a more complete picture. Recently, some allegations about Autonomy have surfaced that sparked interest at DCIG as to their accuracy. (read more)

There is no question that the current economic uncertainty will continue to impact organizations on a global scale for some time to come and every organization is taking a much harder look at their IT budgets for 2009. Gartner notes that the projected IT budgets in 2009 will increase a meager 2.3 percent, down from the earlier projection of 5.8 while IDC has slashed how much it forecasts US IT budgets to grow to below 1% growth for 2009. But just because IT budgets for 2009 are getting cut does not mean the government is going to cut companies any slack in regards to meeting new compliance requests or giving them more time to satisfy them. (read more)