But the eDiscovery Costs!

As a records manager, I have no problem with keeping email with valuable content as long as it is useful, but way keep a decade plus of all that other "stuff" that has no value? When litigation comes (and it will come) someone will have to sort through all of it when and search tools are only of limited use. Besides, while storage itself may be "cheap" (debatable), the cost of supporting that storage is not. At 25+ terabytes and counting, I know that many of my legal department colleagues and I are looking forward to some serious deletion.

The IT Manager as Pack Rat: E-Discovery Advice

Symantec Corp. hosted a virtual round table Friday that touched on some of the e-discovery issues troubling IT managers today, including the challenge of knowing what to chuck and what to keep.

Gregg Davis, CIO and senior vice-president of the San Mateo, Calif.-based construction company Webcor Builders said, "There are some challenges around information management--you can really upset the records management people. A lot of people don't bother to classify information. But IT has to stipulate that if it exists, it exists."

New Amendments to Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Force Companies to Find New Email Management Systems

New amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (court procedures for civil suits) are leading more companies to reevaluate their current email management and archiving systems and find e-discovery software that allows for quick searching and retrieval of electronically stored information (ESI) in response to litigation and discovery requests.

The new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures, as well as other regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, require companies to have an understanding of the breadth and depth of their information stores and establish preservation policies, archive locations, search methods and deletion procedures to properly manage the life cycle of information in the eyes of the government and courts.