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Firms fail to comply with e-discovery logic
For the past six years my company has specialised in email archiving and we have never seen a step-change in buying habits - contrary to analysts’ predictions (Law and disorder will put firms at risk, 5 March).
Even in the largest financial institutions we have only very rarely seen regulatory compliance as the business justification for a large-scale rollout of archiving. Management of storage and service levels for corporate Exchange and Domino servers are still more likely to trigger boardroom funding in most organisations. And yet all that IT Week’s Leader column said about mitigating the risk in litigation is true, and the financial benefits regarding operational and process efficiencies are undeniable. In addition, there’s the strong end-user benefit of having effective knowledge management across files and email - though we have yet to see a customer request this as a key deliverable.
As the article argued, it is hard to understand why so many firms still don’t have their e-discovery systems in order. There is undoubtedly a fast-growing trend for lawyers to go straight to the email, but we think that it will take quite a few more high-profile public embarrassments before e-discovery gets the same mindshare as storage management.
Barney Haye, Essential Computing
March 19, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
I must disagree with Barney. Our three-year-old company has shown a 7x increase in sales and interest related to archiving in six months due to changes in U.S. regulation. It has changed the entire conversation about products and needs.
Roger
InBoxer, Inc.
http://www.inboxer.com
Posted by: Roger | 19 Mar 2007 14:26:18
I'd like to come back on that by saying that my original letter has been edited somewhat. We operate in the European marketplace where US regulation means nothing unless there is a US operating division. As a reseller we support more than 250 customers with the ZANTAZ EAS product and nearly 70 of those are over 1,000 users, with about 10 over 10,000. Included in there are European operations for three of the world's largest financial institutions. These, of course are very heavily regulated in many marketplaces around the world, and most concerned about compliance with these regulations. However when building solutions for an entire manufacturing, retail, pharmaceuticals or logistics enterprise, as opposed to capturing the email of a department of financial traders, compliance does not get so much focus, and absolutely none at all in a lot of European countries.
Posted by: Barney Haye | 21 Mar 2007 10:17:17
