Push Button E-Discovery for Mid-Tier Organizations

E-discovery used to be the province of the enterprise but that is changing, and it is changing fast. Litigation, regulatory compliance, external and internal investigations are moving into the mid-tier of organizations with a few hundred to a few thousand employees. All of these processes require e-discovery collections on user data including email, files and SharePoint—with email being the lion's share of e-discovery targets.

The e-discovery collections process comes complete with tight deadlines, defensible requirements and the need to support litigation professionals in many aspects of collection. But with flat headcount and tight e-discovery budgets, how can Exchange administrators ready their Exchange data for e-discovery or feel comfortable when they may be asked personally to perform e-discovery?

Archiving is the key technology for enabling e-discovery. Archiving optimizes the Exchange storage infrastructure for dramatic storage savings and improved disaster recovery and provides lifecycle management for methodical (and highly automated) data retention. E-discovery, in turn, runs much faster on compact archival storage than on crowded Exchange servers or restored backup. Additional e-discovery search and reporting features enable IT to easily run fast and defensible collections on Exchange and extend early case assessment (ECA) tools to litigation professionals. The result is a clear win-win for Exchange administrators and the groups they support.

E-discovery collections and ECA do not exist in a vacuum. Fast and defensible data collection requires a well-managed storage infrastructure with compact searchable storage and highly available data. Archiving is the way to achieve it. The archiving process makes a single copy of each discrete piece of data from all user data sources including email, files and SharePoint content and stores them on a cost-effective archival storage tier. Exchange is a common target for archive software, which stores single copies of email to create a compact and highly searchable data store for Exchange data. IT can safely use the technology to automatically delete the dozens to hundreds of additional copies that commonly exist on Exchange server storage. Archiving benefits the e-discovery process by creating a highly searchable and available archive, and protects data against accidental deletion. Adding additional e-discovery capabilities makes for a highly leveraged method of managing the Exchange storage infrastructure.

Let's look at two of the features that directly impact the ability to do e-discovery on Exchange: lifecycle management and e-discovery collection and ECA.

Lifecycle management. Hierarchical storage management (HSM) uses policies to identify and archive email, moves them to archival storage, enforces and tracks retention periods and migrates archived data to less expensive storage tiers as the data ages. Archived email remain transparently available to end-users up until final deletion. If archived email should be returned to MS Exchange then they can be easily restored.

Administrators may set any data lifecycle parameters they need. Data is protected from any modification or overwrite until it has reached end of life. At that point, administrators may easily delete them or automate their deletion, unless the data has been placed on legal hold. This can be extended to a global Exchange network, which makes it possible for the entire corporation to effectively manage Exchange lifecycles among multiple servers and domains.

E-discovery collections and ECA. Federal and state laws have considerably tightened up e-discovery deadlines. Since the majority of e-discovery takes place on email—and the majority of that is Exchange—these deadlines have a major impact on the collections process.

IT should also be able to provide access and ECA capabilities to other e-discovery participants like attorneys, litigation professionals and e-discovery consultants. IT should be able to safely assign access privileges so attorneys can quickly and easily search archived email, apply legal holds to relevant messages, tag email to classify them for review, and export search results.

All searches should happen within the archives so administrators never have to restore data first as they do with backup tapes. Searchers should be able to  identify and collect messages by name, date ranges, specific words and other fields. Search should include attachments as well.

Searchers should be able to apply a legal hold to collected data in-place at any time. Legal hold locks the file against changes by suspending deletion or modification actions on all email in the collected set. Users should just as easily be able to lift legal holds and have the email simply revert to their original retention policy. Users should be able to conduct tagging, which is the process of adding tags and comments to collected email. Reviewers should either use standard tags or quickly add custom tag names and be able to make comments to specific email.   

Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange

Successful email e-discovery needs either specialized collections software or archiving with e-discovery features. A large enterprise usually needs high-end collection applications because of huge volumes of digital data and frequency of litigation. But mid-tier environments benefit the most from archiving with e-discovery features because of its massive leverage over the entire Exchange infrastructure. Metalogix offers Archive Manager-Exchange Edition to provide e-discovery, data retention and storage optimization for the Exchange storage infrastructure. Archive Manager's many features include no quotas, protection and elimination of .PSTs to optimize storage, transparently preserve the user experience, improve disaster recovery, lifecycle management, e-discovery and more. With storage optimization alone, Archive Manager customers can reduce email storage costs up to 80% and backup and recovery times by 50%.  Additional features such as lifecycle management enable IT to easily manage and automate data retention while keeping email immediately available to end-users. Push-button e-discovery is no pipe dream. With Metalogix Archive Manager it's possible to take advantage of effective e-discovery today, and slash Exchange storage costs while you're at it.

Metalogix is a trusted provider of innovative content lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and cloud platforms. We deliver high-performance solutions to scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store, archive and protect enterprise content. Metalogix provides global support to thousands of customers and strategic partners and is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft's High Potential ISV Group and a GSA provider. For a more detailed version of this article, or to request more information on Metalogix Archive Manager, please call 877-450-8667 or email info@metalogix.com.