Enterprise Vault.cloud: Control litigation expense through controlling ESI

[jwong007]

Hello everyone,

I’ve been in training and will begin conducting training for a few folks.  This got me thinking about our customers in that with all the Symantec archiving and e-discovery solutions that are available, is Symantec actually helping them to control their archiving and e-discovery expenses?  Well, the answer is a resounding yes.

Let’s discuss how we assist our customers to control archiving and e-discovery expenses with Symantec’s Enterprise Vault.cloud.  I recently read an article titled, “Litigation: Controlling litigation expense and exposure through appropriate self-help”.  The article states:

“Volume often is the primary driver of expense and burden in litigation, but fortunately, it largely is within a company’s control. Although some ESI is subject to certain legal preservation requirements, such as Sarbanes Oxley and pending or anticipated litigation, much of a company’s ESI — indeed, perhaps the vast majority — at any given moment need not be preserved except for genuine business purposes. Businesses can dramatically cut cost and risk in litigation by adopting, and more importantly enforcing, appropriate document retention policies that ensure the routine destruction of all ESI that need not be maintained for legal or business purposes. With auto-deletion of ESI (except for data required to be preserved), employees need not be entrusted — or burdened — with routinely cleaning out their otherwise cluttered and growing mail boxes. Short time periods (e.g., 30 days) and small size limitations (e.g., megabytes, not gigabytes) are key. The same is true for archived and disaster-recovery data. Periodic compliance audits help ensure that companies do not learn of ESI hoarders only in litigation”

The key takeaway from this article is that our customers can control this cost by creating an appropriate retention policy and adhering to it.  The key is automating the process so that companies no longer have to entrust their employees to “faithfully and dutifully” removing documents that are not necessarily required for genuine business purposes.

With Enterprise Vault.cloud, we can assist our customers with easy to set default retention period for the entire archive environment.  This can be set from as little as 14 days.

Symantec can also assist with customized retention policies that can be enforced via active directory groups or allocated for employees to apply (assuming that they have been granted permission by the retention manager).

Bottom-line, Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud can assist in automating retention policies of ESI and therefore control the upward spiraling cost of litigation.  And at the very least, mitigate risk of ESI that has “out-lived its usefulness”.

To access the article that this information is based on, go to: http://www.insidecounsel.com/2014/02/13/litigation-controlling-litigation-expense-and-expo.

Cheers,

James Wong
Sr. Systems Engineer, Symantec Corporation
www.symantec.com