A new Forrester Research study says most IT managers, even at billion-dollar organizations, are unprepared to comply with federal eDiscovery laws.
Network World, citing Forrester’s findings from discussions with 25 major corporations, says most companies do not have proper procedures or equipment in place. New regulations state companies must be able to produce all electronic documents relevant to a particular case within 100 days; most survey respondents said “no can do.”
At a minimum, organizations should have reliable systems in place for archiving and searching e-mail records.
“There’s so much [information] in e-mail. It’s a high-volume communication method. It’s where all the smoking guns tend to live,” says analyst Barry Murphy.
Murphy puts the cost of addressing these issues proactively by investing in an archival or forensics system into perspective, comparing them to less attractive legal methods.
If e-mail isn’t properly categorized into messages that might be useful in lawsuits and those that are not, companies may be forced to pay lawyers to review their entire archives. “At $200 an hour, that [is] a lot of money,” he says.
But what about the ramification of long-term archiving of internal e-mail? Many executives fail to take action because they question the legality of such practices.
Some executives remain obstinate, saying information stored on a user’s computer belongs to the employee rather than the company. But information stored on a company-owned computer or network is a company asset and must be treated as such, Murphy notes.
Forrester says data retention and management should be viewed as a cost of doing business – a cost that may result in a great deal of time and money saved down the road.
