Jatheon Email Archiving In The News
Evident Domain
By Dan Kaplan
August 07 2008
With eDiscovery laws in effect, companies find benefits to data archiving, says TLC Vision's Roger McIlmoyle. Dan Kaplan reports.
About two years ago, TLC Vision, fresh off a recent acquisition, got sued by an employee who believed he was slighted by the company's profit-sharing program. The employee's lawyers demanded that TLC Vision produce any electronically stored communications related to the case.
It wasn't an out-of-left-field request for TLC. After all, the $300 million-a-year eye care services company that specializes in laser vision correction surgery (Tiger Woods was a client) had been storing emails since 1999 – long before some employees even had internet access. But what made this eDiscovery request particularly burdensome was the arduous recovery process that resulted. It spanned such a wide range of dates that the IT department had to devote two full-time staff members to the job.
“It was brutal,” recalls Roger McIlmoyle, the Chesterfield, Mo. based company's director of technical services. “To restore all the data from tape literally took us weeks. And then to index it all took days and days. And then to conduct searches on it…It was extremely painful.”
That incident, combined with a sense that such requests would become commonplace when the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which codified eDiscovery) took effect at the end of 2006, forced TLC Vision to act. So the company got rid of its tapes and deployed an email archiving solution from Toronto-based Jatheon Technologies that allowed it to index and easily search records.
“I think people know now that electronic documents are available and they're required to be available,” McIlmoyle, 46, says. “Now if we have any litigation going on, it's just part of the general requirement to deliver documentation. It's almost become a boilerplate. I'm sure every other organization is encountering the same thing.”
Most are, at least heavily regulated and deep-pocketed companies that regularly face government mandates and litigations. According to a study last year by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 67 percent of large enterprises – defined as having 20,000 employees or more – have been involved in litigation that required the retrieval of electronic documents, compared to 47 percent in 2005.
The amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which took effect Dec. 1, 2006, order opposing litigants to meet and discuss what electronic information is applicable to the case. The amended regulations also state that companies, at the first sign of a possible lawsuit, must begin archiving records – most commonly email exchanges – that could be related to the case.
Archiving solutions that are easily searchable help meet these new demands in ways tapes and disks never could. While the security department still, for the most part, oversees the preservation and recovery process, many products are becoming intuitive enough for legal teams to use – without relying on IT for guidance.
But, as organizations are learning, these offerings go well beyond providing businesses with the ability to quickly produce electronic evidence if they are sued (although that remains the most common benefit of email archiving, according to a second Enterprise Strategy Group study).
According to experts, eDiscovery also offers a key way for organizations to get a handle on rising amounts of data stored throughout their infrastructure – which, if done right, is part of an overall risk management and mitigation strategy.
“You need to not think about eDiscovery as just a reactive process to some legal proceedings, but more as a proactive approach to enterprise information management,” says Bill Bartow, vice president of product management at Tizor Systems, a Maynard, Mass. based data auditing firm.
“eDiscovery should be considered part of a broader project,” Bartow says. “There are lots of different places where sensitive data with legal implications could be stored.” (He urges companies, when preserving data, to remember sensitive information sitting in some other repository outside of the email logs, such as databases and file shares.)
McIlmoyle says that TLC Vision decided to begin retaining emails in 1999 – not because it anticipated an influx of litigation, but because it believed it was a best practice.
“The company has always known that we're dealing in privacy, and a great deal of communication occurs in email,” he says. “The fact that we can satisfy some legal request is a side benefit. That's not the reason we did it. It comes down to risk mitigation, primarily the risk of losing information critical to the company.”
Chris Bradley, vice president of marketing at Bellevue, Wash. based MessageGate, maker of messaging compliance software, says companies should consider adopting a preservation solution that classifies and categorizes data.
That would be helpful when searching through an archive, of course, but such technology also could be used to potentially flag inappropriate content from being sent in the first place – thereby limiting the chance of a lawsuit, he says.
The push to preserve data also allows organizations to set retention policies, which let them get rid of data they don't need – a priority for organizations holding valuable information, says Brian Babineau, a senior IT analyst at Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group.
“I think the biggest thing proved by the federal rules is that electronically stored information establishes that organizations have to view business records as potential sources of record,” he says. “[They] will drive organizations to make better decisions on information management.” continue>>
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