ILTA 2010 (Las Vegas)

I just got back from the ILTA show in Las Vegas. I had booth duty most of the time so have little opportunity to scout the show but had several interesting conversations with attendees as they came into the Iron Mountain booth.

Many I spoke with were looking at ESI archives as a proactive step in ensuring ESI was available for litigation hold as well as a central repository for the collection phase. Some related first hand experiences with the difficulty of quickly placing litigation holds on ESI their custodians had direct control of such as email (in the form of PSTs) and file system data. The main symptom with many of these organizations was the requirement from IT that custodians have a relatively small email box limit to control storage requirements forcing custodians to move email data they wanted to keep (which was also discoverable) into PST files on share drives, their desktops as well as many other types of removable media.

This practice obviously complicates the locating and securing of ESI if it is not readily available and searchable.

Many of the booth attendees had figured out that a centralized ESI archive would allow them to capture, index, search and secure ESI based on legal requirements. Iron Mountain does offer the on-premise NearPoint ESI content archive which captures, indexes, manages via retention policies, and disposes of ESI for the most requested ESI data types; Exchange email, SharePoint and Windows file system data.

This NearPoint proactive solution ensures ESI is captured and managed to centralized retention policies thereby allow an organization to search for and secure on a litigation hold, any potentially responsive ESI within minutes. A best practice is to consider your responsibilities in eDiscovery and put systems and practices in place to address those responsibilities in the manner expected by the court. The NearPoint ESI archive can help you do this.