When it comes to electronic data discovery (e-discovery) the process at most organizations today is the equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack. Explosive and uncontrolled growth of enterprise data, and e-mail in particular, continues to tax IT departments in terms of time and money spent for management and storage. More importantly, it has left most companies ill-prepared for litigation and investigation.

The fact of the matter, according to industry analysts at Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), is that 77 percent of companies responding to e-discovery requests have to produce e-mail. Considered perhaps the most mission critical of all business applications, e-mail has become the vessel for business information and official company records. Just look at the million and billion dollar fines and penalties handed out by the courts in response to less-than-adequate production of e-mails in the e-discovery process.

Not all e-mail is created equal, however. There’s a mix of archived content ranging from junk to critical sitting in corporate e-mail stores. The challenge for IT and legal is to distinguish between the two.

Intelligent archiving can help. Products such as Symantec Corp.’s Enterprise Vault 7.0 with intelligent archiving, for example, give control over mammoth e-mail stores back to IT. Not only does intelligent archiving help companies judiciously identify e-mail content, but also helps organizations navigate a middle ground between “save everything” and “delete everything” policies.

From a risk and cost perspective alone, the case for e-mail archiving is strong and is growing stronger every day as companies wake up to the fact that they might be the next litigation case just waiting to happen.

Making the Case
The numbers are overwhelming. ESG estimates that organizations will archive 7,000 petabytes of e-mail over the next four years alone. At what cost?

All companies have a variety of e-mails ranging from non-critical (such as personal, newsletters, jokes, and sales promotions) to critical (such as business records, transactions, and correspondence with suppliers). Most likely there’s no need to save it all.

"Save everything" strategies for the purpose of preparation and risk avoidance in case of an e-discovery event, while noble, are costly both on the front-end (storage) and back-end (e-discovery and legal review).

In fact, the legal cost of review is recognized as the most expensive part of the e-discovery process. With legal review costs ranging from $50 to $200 per hour, depending upon location, the goal of any company is for the legal review of only relevant data.

At the other end of the spectrum, companies that delete e-mails within 30 days, for example, may reduce storage requirements and cut costs, but e-mails are likely to be duplicated on other data stores. Data is commonly duplicated multiple times within the organization.

When it comes to archive, the goal is to save the critical e-mail and wipe out the rest. Organizations want to be able to classify and manage e-mail retention across different categories of information to reduce costs and manage risk.

A Better Way
An intelligent archiving platform stores, manages, and enables the discovery of corporate data from e-mail systems, file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and collaboration and content management systems.

Products like Enterprise Vault utilize intelligent classification and retention technologies to capture, categorize, index, and store target data to enforce policies and protect corporate assets while helping to reduce storage costs and simplify management.

Classification options include using automated classification, user-driven classification, or third-party -- i.e., records management -- approaches.

The automated classification engine reduces archive size and search times by categorizing and retaining e-mail based on 50 predefined or an unlimited number of customizable rule types. For example, the automated engine may look for financial data within an e-mail message, tag it, and retain it according to retention policy.

The user classification engine ensures a consistent and defensible records retention program by classifying all e-mail as each message is created or read by the user directly into Microsoft Outlook. So, for example, a window pops up on an e-mail and asks the user to identify the content—is it a record, is it junk—and then applies the appropriate retention policy.

Retention and deletion rules are enforced and applied granularly across different classes of information. Policy enforcement, or saving relevant e-mails to archive and disposing of trivial e-mails, gives IT command over archive stores instead of allowing archive to snowball out of control.

Intelligent archiving gives IT managers a new way to think about archive strategy. Rather than determine archive based on time or size limits, intelligent archive allows IT to consider archive based on content.

The benefits of an intelligent archive strategy allow the business to decide what data it will save for a specified retention period based on set policy. As a result, long-term retention is more effective as classified and tagged data can be easily retrieved.

Intelligent archiving is about intelligent storage, retention, and discovery: knowing where to most economically store data based on classification; determining the retention period for the data; and being able to search and retrieve data during an investigation or for e-discovery.

Rather than simply investing in archive, the time has come for companies to invest in what goes into the archive.