Enhancing backup protection critical for eDiscovery compliance

By Michael
April 30, 2013

Companies have long used their backup tape management and hard disk file tracking tools to ensure they remain safe in the event of a disaster. These assets create an up-to-date image of the last time systems were replicated to the dedicated backup infrastructure, allowing organizations to retrieve missing system information or restore the entire office environment from a previous point in the software’s life. Snapshots, daily backups and file tracking tools make this kind of high-level continuity possible. It also helps businesses comply with eDiscovery inquiries.

Handling increasingly unwieldy backups
As the complexity and depth of corporate storage infrastructure continues to grow, the process of responding to a court-mandated data search may become more difficult for firms without the proper resources to plumb their own archives. Backups provide a more active and accurate picture of what has been happening recently within the organization, and as Transit Media wrote, increased business attention to the quality and flexibility of these solutions has turned them into a system that’s primed for regular file retrieval, anyway. This makes it a much simpler process to pull out specific data as requested for an eDiscovery or audit inquiry.

E-discovery isn’t just for big cases tried by big law firms anymore,” said attorney and eDiscovery specialist David Horrigan. He told Transit Media that tools like predictive coding and enhanced file search capabilities in corporate software infrastructure will likely gain increasing popularity as data centers continue to grow and inquiries become more common.

Working on storage communication
The trouble some firms run into is that various personnel throughout the organization have differing views on how best to handle these kinds of backups and continuity checks. According to ZDNet, CIOs are taking responsibility for more of the backup architecture, meaning they have to sort and organize file tracking, data inquiries and ensure the quality of data in long term storage capacities. Transit Media wrote that those lower down in the IT management chain, however, do not feel that backups are that important to the ongoing stability of the business. If everyone isn’t together on compliance and security initiatives, these plans are more likely to fail.

Creating a unified storage infrastructure of comprehensive backups and powerful file tracking tools can help relieve the strain of eDiscovery inquiries. However, firms need to ensure that everyone in the company understands the importance of backup resources so that these assets don’t mistakenly get short-changed at any level of management or interaction.

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