Unifying Records and Retention Management Across the Enterprise

A number of market trends have made records management, retention management, e-discovery and litigation functions increasingly daunting and complex for organizations.

First, digital content is growing exponentially across numerous repositories and applications, including enterprise applications, file servers, portals and application servers. At the same time, email has become a primary communications tool, forcing businesses to find ways to deal with the risks and storage issues surrounding this content.

The compliance burden—in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 17a, and many other regulations—continues to grow, leading companies to spend heavily on applications to control information retention and disclosure. Lastly, there exists a critical need to optimize the search technologies companies heavily invested in to provide employees with better access to expanding amounts of enterprise content.

While the technologies organizations have employed to address these challenges are generally powerful and useful tools—such as email archiving, compliance applications, enterprise search and high-volume storage devices—the result has been less than the sum of the parts from a records and retention management perspective. Why? Because there hasn't been a way to apply a unified, defensible records and retention policy to content in multiple repositories and multiple applications across an organization.

Many enterprises currently have no real records and retention rules. Those that have them only apply those rules to physical records, or to a small subset of electronic records stored within designated records management systems. Even within this subset, the siloed nature of the systems involved means that the rules are often applied inconsistently, or (in the case of storage devices), created using a limited feature-set that encourages the formulation of legally indefensible policies, such as those based on content size. At best, this is a missed opportunity to manage risk, lower costs and reduce content clutter for end users. More likely, since inconsistent application of policy is worse than having no policy at all, it undercuts the legal and compliance drivers that often spur records and retention management initiatives.

Enterprisewide Records Management, Retention Management and E-discovery

Stellent® Universal Records Management™ is the first product that empowers organizations to apply records and retention policies, as well as legal discovery and holds, to all relevant content (not just records) across the enterprise—from email attachments and content stored in file servers to physical records in a warehouse. Furthermore, the product suite defines, manages and executes these records and retention-management policies for all enterprise content from a single server. This functionality facilitates the application of litigation or audit holds by freezing content across the enterprise...making it easier to locate information during legal discovery.

In addition, Stellent Universal Records Management gives companies the ability to harness investments made in other technology systems by utilizing an agent architecture to enforce retention policies and schedules in each content repository across an organization. It can apply records and retention schedules and litigation holds to content located in nearly any repository or application. This "in-place" functionality enables companies to leave content in its existing location rather than moving it to a central repository for records and retention management. The key benefit of this approach is that rules are directly applied to content where it resides. Agents also send information back to the Stellent Universal Records Management server, enabling it to maintain an up-to-date catalog of all critical enterprise content.

Stellent Universal Records Management's agent application programming interfaces (APIs) are open and published. In fact, Stellent's own repositories—including Stellent Content Server and Stellent Imaging and Business Process Management—present themselves to the Universal Records Management server using agents. Additionally, the company is partnering with a number of leading technology vendors (such as email archive vendors) to develop agents that apply records and retention management policies and litigation holds to content residing within their applications. The individual applications will continue to perform their functions, but will do so in ways that are consistent with enterprise policies. Customers can use agents developed by Stellent and its partners, or leverage the open, modular nature of the system to build agents for their own custom applications. The first agents Stellent and its partners plan to release are shown in the list below.

Driving Significant Benefits for Multiple Audiences

Stellent Universal Records Management generates significant benefits for three primary audiences: information technology (IT) departments: legal and compliance teams; and records managers.

Reducing IT Costs and Decreasing Content Clutter
Two of the biggest challenges facing IT departments today are accommodating content storage growth, and ensuring applications and search functions operate efficiently in the face of rapidly increasing content.

Stellent Universal Records Management can help IT staffs address these issues by instituting content retention schedules and policies—developed or approved by the legal departments or the business units responsible for the content—that systematically facilitate the disposition of outdated or underutilized content in technology systems across the enterprise. Information that is no longer needed is methodically removed, while content that is required for compliance, business or e-discovery purposes is preserved for an appropriate length of time. Stellent Universal Records Management also gives IT groups the ability to systematize and distribute content retention decisions to the most knowledgeable and responsible people, rather than viewing the problem as a technical archiving issue. By eliminating unnecessary information, organizations can reduce content storage costs and increase the performance of search functions and business applications.

Mitigating Legal Risks and Facilitating Compliance
For legal and compliance personnel, Stellent Universal Records Management brings a new level of efficiency and sophistication to the processes of e-discovery and risk mitigation.

Based on a company's retention and disposition rules, content that's no longer useful or required can be systematically destroyed, which can decrease litigation risks and discovery costs (by reducing the amount of content that must be audited and reviewed). Additionally, the Stellent solution ensures users do not delete information subject to discovery by applying litigation and audit holds to content across the enterprise. If necessary, the Stellent system can move or copy this content into the central repository for discovery.