Back Up for Recovery, Archive For Discovery

In today's fast-paced, data-driven business world, having the right information at the right time is the difference between success and failure ' and nowhere is that more important than in the ever-changing, regulatory-demanding realm of e-commerce.

And, with organizations dealing with unprecedented amounts of business-critical data to store and keep accessible, the challenges of managing information have become greater than ever before.

What's more, this trend is likely to continue, with some experts predicting that organizations will have 50% more information ' including e-mail and other unstructured data ' to manage every year. Many e-commerce firms, particularly pure-play e-enterprises, will find this old hat and will, in fact, experience greater increases in information-acquisition, interpretation, filtering, evaluation, response and storage than those that bricks-and-mortar, or mixed bricks-and-mortar and “e” businesses can anticipate.

As a result of this continuing growth, information management is a proximate and pressing business concern. Organizations must ensure that electronic data is routinely backed up, safely stored and recoverable in the event of a disruption or disaster. At the same time, they must also make sure that records are preserved and expired in conjunction with retention schedules, and are searchable and discoverable, to enable efficient response to litigation and investigatory matters should problems arise. Indeed, the preparation and use of electronic discovery is accelerating and attenuating these needs.

Fortunately, today's advanced backup and intelligent e-mail archiving tools address these challenges, and together form the cornerstone of a proactive information-management strategy that all businesses are wisely advised to maintain, or to build and then maintain. Used together, advanced backup enables data recovery while archiving efficiently and proactively enabling data discovery. With these capabilities on hand, e-commerce firms can continue to operate with minimal fears of the vicissitudes of life bringing disaster from which they cannot easily, or at all, recover.

Data Recovery

Backup technology has come a long way since the days of tape-only solutions. Next-generation tools now leverage disk and tape to enable organizations to automatically and continuously save information, and store it onsite for recovery of individual messages or files, to back up and recover data at remote offices, as well as to back up large amounts of data enterprise-wide and store it offsite for longer-term disaster-recovery purposes.

Indeed, the objective of backup tools is to recover data and, in doing so, provide a precaution against the loss or damage of that information. This objective serves several purposes, from the practical to the legal. These tools have matured through the years, with advanced backup tools now enabling organizations to augment traditional tape-based data protection with disk-based backup technologies. In fact, many organizations back up primarily to disk, with some using it for daily, continuous backups, in addition to using this approach as a replacement to tape as the final repository for information.

Better yet, today's most sophisticated backup tools optimize backup and recovery for disk and tape, giving organizations a single, unified console for managing their many backup and recovery technologies ' from snapshots, replication and virtual tape libraries (“VTLs”) to deduplication and continuous data protection.

Clearly, these next-generation backup technologies are essential for recovering data, but when used for litigation response, backup falls short. Finding specific information on backup in response to a discovery request can be cumbersome, time-consuming and costly. Also, the more an organization routinely uses such tapes to restore data, the less likely a court may be able to consider data stored on backup tapes inaccessible pursuant to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Consequently, for granular and efficient data discovery, organizations need a different tool.

Information Discovery

Just as backup tools are designed to enable data recovery, archiving systems are designed to facilitate information discovery.

An e-mail archiving system, for example, helps address the challenges of storing, managing and discovering unstructured information, from messaging and collaborative systems and file servers across the enterprise, which gives businesses a single information repository that supports litigation activities and that automates long-term records-retention policies. The ability to proactively organize and control information helps organizations reduce their legal risk and helps them control electronic-discovery costs, which are often very high due to the large volume of e-mail messages that must be collected, processed, reviewed and produced.

e-Mail archiving tools also allow organizations to migrate and archive e-mail content from end-user created .pst and .nsf files into the archive repository, while maintaining the end-user experience. This process is a valuable way to reduce the time, cost and risk of future discovery efforts, as the information can be centralized and controlled in the archive; it is also a nifty means of maintaining a critically important element of day-to-day business process in storing and managing mission-critical company information.

As recent legal decisions have highlighted, it is imperative that organizations are able to quickly and efficiently implement a legal hold in response to anticipated litigation. e-Mail archiving tools provide the ability to automatically apply legal holds against archived data to ensure that relevant information will not be deleted. By automating this process and removing the legal-hold responsibility from individual custodians, an organization also helps to protect itself against the possibility of destroying electronic information relevant to a pending matter ' an event that can result in sanctions.

New content may be added to the hold automatically during scheduled searches. Then, once a case is closed, holds can be quickly released on a case-by-case basis, allowing documents to revert to their originally scheduled deletion dates. This functionality helps alleviate the problem of information being placed on legal hold and then forgotten about, creating a backlog of data that never progresses through the information life cycle.

In addition, with an e-mail archiving tool, attorneys and other authorized personnel can conduct searches across all archived content on a case-by-case basis, obviating the need for outsourcing or cumbersome backup-tape restoration, and accelerating early case assessment and the overall discovery process. Some organizations have been able to pay for the cost of an archiving solution with the costs saved from using it for just one legal matter.

A bonus is that some archiving tools provide automated classification of e-mail by applying context to content, accelerating rapid search. These products' ability to also search metadata and a wide range of files types aids in streamlining the discovery process and in helping counsel meet discovery deadlines.

e-Mail archiving tools also ease review, enabling multiple reviewers to mark items as being relevant or non-relevant to a pending matter. Because these marks can be permanently assigned to a message or group of messages, a privileged message that appeared in another review process would be pre-sorted, alleviating the need for multiple review of the same information ' a time- and money-saver.

And another point: e-Mail archiving helps keep storage costs low. By archiving according to policy, a company can use these systems to move less frequently used unstructured information from high-cost disk and archive to lower-cost storage, all the while maintaining accessibility. A growing number of e-mail archiving tools also leverages optimized single-instance storage and compression technologies to reduce the data footprint more.

By using an e-mail archiving system, organizations cannot only lower the cost of data collection and preservation, but also streamline review and analysis of information in response to legal matters.

A Unified Platform

One of the most significant technology developments to recently emerge is an information-management platform that unifies data protection, archiving and recovery, a combination that gives organizations a single infrastructure that reduces the complexity and cost of disaster recovery and information discovery. This new approach to information management also enables organizations to customize their backup, recovery and archiving environment with tape, disk or a combination.

As organizations face ever-expanding volumes of data, taking an active approach to information management can significantly reduce legal risk and help an organization address the rising costs associated with managing and discovering its information. Deploying an archive strategy is an easy first step to get control of widely dispersed and unstructured data.

Once the archive has been established and the organization has visibility into its information, it can then develop policies around
retention, and use the archive to automate these policies. Backup tools can then be used solely for disaster-recovery purposes, and not solely as a means of discovering information. These backup tools can also be applied to protect the archived infrastructure to help ensure that all data and application information can be restored in the event of a disaster or data corruption.

By using backup tools for recovery together with archiving tools for discovery, organizations can ensure that their data is not only protected, but discoverable now and in the future.