Category: Archiving

A great headline from InfoWorld.com that briefly looks at the effects the amended FRCP has on IT professionals who are tasked with purchasing storage platforms for their companies.

I don’t totally agree with this quote by author Mario Apicella, but I can certainly appreciate his perspective:

“… hosted services that offer remote access for e-discovery and similar activies are a worthwhile alternative to building a layer of compliance applications in-house.”

True it may be easier (and more efficient) for a company to outsource some of their storage/compliance responsibilities, but it is still imperative that the IT professionals and company attorneys discuss the issues revolving around the storage and preservation of electronic records (i.e. e-mails, e-docs, etc.).

Even though a hosted service may adequately handle the logistics of preserving e-mail, the amended rules still impose a quasi-duty upon lawyers to be familiar enough with their clients’ information systems so they can intelligently discuss the exchange of electronic data with the opposing party.

Link to article.

My article “The Easy Button” recently posted on InsideCounsel.com where I take a look at four vendors that provide tools for searching and analyzing e-mails. The four vendors mainly sell their products to in-house counsel with the alluring appeal that in-house attorneys can search employee e-mail and discover potential smoking guns before the litigation trigger is pulled.

The four vendors I talked to for the article were AXS-One, InBoxer, Clearwell Systems, and Estorian. Each vendor enjoys a certain sweet spot.

I wanted to talk to AXS-One after I read the great story on ComputerWorld.com about how KeyBank adopted the AXS-One Compliance Platform to help manage the laborious process of collecting and producing e-mails from their 300TB e-mail archive. The story provides a rare insight into how major corporations are dealing with the stress of complying with e-discovery requests.

I am very impressed with InBoxer and have blogged about the company in the past. The big seller to me with InBoxer is that it’s so easy to deploy - you either pop in a rack mounted server or install the software in a virtual appliance and it’s ready to go within an hour, or even a few minutes. In-house counsel search and analyze employee e-mail through an online interface (you can visit www.enronemail.com to test out InBoxer for yourself).

I’ve been following Clearwell for a while now, and I believe they have one of the most intuitive interfaces of the group. They made it very clear to me that they are not an e-mail archiving system, but that they work complementary to systems you may already have set up from Symantec or EMC. A Clearwell system can also get up and running very fast, and provides such a comfortable interface that I can see where some users may not even need training.

And lastly Estorian offers an interesting alternative to the slick-ness of InBoxer and Clearwell. Estorian’s LookingGlass software may not look as pretty, but I found that it provides an extensive array of options for searching, monitoring and saving potentially risky e-mail messages. The company views LookingGlass as more of a compliance tool because users can easily set up searches to automatically and continuously monitor employee e-mail for risky keywords.

I foresee in the near future that every corporation will have some sort of e-mail analysis tool constantly monitoring employee e-mail. And why not? In this country, the company owns the e-mail and has the right to read every message sent by an employee through the company-owned servers. Companies that purchase tools such as the ones mentioned above will enjoy a) the comfort of knowing that something is policing the e-mail servers for naughtiness, and b) the ability to quickly search and secure e-mail messages that are relevant to the latest litigation matter that flys across their desk.

Link to my article.

A good article from Processor magazine entitled “How to Archive Email” (via edd blog online) that tackles the subject from a technical perspective.

The article starts off with a good quote:

“For many employees, using email is really only about two things: sending and receiving. But for enterprises as a whole, email is their lifeblood.”

I like that quote because it’s a good reminder that no matter how much the e-discovery industry rants and raves about the need to archive this and preserve that, the majority of folks that use e-mail just see it as a convenient communication medium, and nothing more.

Dean Richardson of ArcMail Technology is quoted:

[…many companies] “opt for email archiving, not for particular compliance reasons but because their users want unlimited email storage without mailbox restrictions.”

Richardson also declares that the trend is bending towards “keeping everything” asking “Do you want to be the only one in court without a copy of your own email?” That’s a valid question since a company may feel safe if they appropriately deleted a sent e-mail from their own servers, but it will turn up in discovery because the recipient of that e-mail saved it on their own server. You don’t want trial to be the first time you see that e-mail message - an e-mail archiving system (based on a well thought-out policy) would have helped you find that message during your own review.

Link to story

Good story from Enterprisestorageforum.com on the current state of e-mail archive vendors. The market is still growing, but mergers are starting to happen. The vendors that will succeed will be those that take advantage of new technology and make their services scalable.

Siliconrepublic.com posts a story today entitled “Irish firms in email archive crisis” which simply reports that companies in Ireland struggle with the same issues of archiving e-mail as here in the U.S. and everywhere else in the world.

Two quotes:

“People assume email is on the backup tape. The backup tape is not an archive option, it’s a recovery option.”

“…some firms print emails and then rescan them into an electronic document management system to save filing cabinet space, an unnecessary process if proper email archiving is in place.”

I have long respected Zantaz for their work in the industry and it looks like I’m not the only one. U.K.-based Autonomy announced July 3 that they acquired Zantaz for $375 million. Zantaz was founded in 1996 and was one of the first companies to go down the road of e-mail archiving. They still run strong today in 9 of the top 10 global law firms.

The Futurelawyer mentioned InBoxer back on June 8 and I was very intrigued. InBoxer is a rack-mounted virtual appliance that conncts to your e-mail server and can be used to archive and filter messages as needed.

According to the InfoWorld review the appliance will work with both Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino and scores each e-mail message on a scale of 1 to 100 for inappropriate content, privacy violations, and other metrics. Obviously, InBoxer was initially aimed at the risk management sector, but it can just as obviously be used for e-discovery issues.

The largest kudos for the company goes for their test site located at www.EnronEmail.com. You sign up for a free account and have the ability to use their software through your Web browser (which is how you would use it anyway). The site cautions you on the offensive language you’ll find inside the Enron e-mails, but this is a fantastic way for potential customers to test run the appliance.

Why don’t more vendors do this? I congratulate InBoxer for having enough confidence in their appliance to allow a test run like this. And the system is a joy to use.

IDC released a study done in May 2007 that predicts the e-mail archiving applications market will approach $1.4 billion in 2011. A press release reported that the study saw the e-mail archiving applications market grow by 45% in 2006, “which was driven by the need for e-mail archiving to satisfy compliance, legal discovery, and storage optimization requirements.”

Where public companies have been dealing with this technology to satisfy SEC regulations, the rampant explosion of electronic discovery has further fueled the indistry. The press release further reports that the IDC study pegged Symantec/KVS to lead the market in 2006 followed by Zantaz Inc. The study covered most of the big boys in the industry including AXS-One, EMC, IBM, and Postini.

It’s an interesting exercise to consider what folks outside the U.S. think about our discovery system. Take for example this story from Techworld (which is based in the UK) entitled “US legal discovery is an horrendous nightmare - Pray, pray you don’t get involved in it.” They’re reporting on the AMD v. Intel matter and warn IT professionls to cosider an e-mail archiving system for their company if they anticipate ever getting sued under a U.S. Federal Court.

The story reports that Intel has already turned over 17 million pages of documents to AMD, and expects to turn over tens of millions more. Intel is in hot water since they’ve admitted they may not have certain relevant e-mails any longer.

My favorite quote:

“AMD will press the court to impose changes on Intel’s existing information preservation procedures. Kicking its opponent when it’s down with legally-authorised (sic) boots? Oh, yes please.”