Electronic records management systems, email archiving and e-discovery systems will need to step up to the plate and deliver results without undue burden on IT budgets or department man-power time.

Sonian is here to do our part. Scalable, reliable, secure, and most importantly, affordable email archiving for all.

But first a recap on messaging system state of affairs:

• We love our email. 75 percent of the content generated by employees is transmitted and stored in mail servers.
• “IT” has difficulty balancing growing storage management costs with the retention requirements of government, industry, and corporate rules and regulations.
• Archiving must become an essential and well-thought-out component of your IT infrastructure in order to protect critical information stored in email.

And finally:

• If your organization’s email is not archived effectively, you may face fines, lose legal battles and struggle to recover from a crisis or disaster.
• According to a recent report from Osterman Research, 80 percent of organizations lack a true archiving solution, and 75 percent “are at risk of losing important business records contained in messaging systems.”

The five common misconceptions cited below promote risky decision making practices that can lead to problems that could have been avoided:

1. “Our industry is not regulated, so we don’t need to archive.”
2. “Email archiving will expose us to risk.”
3. “Our backup system is our archive.”
4. “Exchange 2007 solves our email archive needs.”
5. “Email archiving solutions are too expensive for our company.”

Sonian has the most cost-effective archive solution available to organizations of all sizes. Our philosophical approach is to help overwhelmed IT departments implement archiving without breaking the IT budget.

The explosion of electronic discovery has also forced law firms to become more tech-savvy.

And new federal statutes that require extensive financial reporting and electronic record-keeping, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, have forced the rapid adoption of technology in the legal profession.

The Sonian hosted archive platform (“Total Sonian”) is the easiest and most cost effective email archive and e-discovery platform available. Sonian is suitable for firms of all sizes, and uses a cost plus model to ensure the e-discovery burden doesn’t break the IT budget.

One-fifth of companies surveyed admit that their business has opted to settle a lawsuit to avoid the cost of recovering and searching through electronic documents.

47% of respondents also admit being uncertain that their legal team can effectively review relevant e-mail in the 99-day window allowed under the law.

51% say they have implemented or are planning to implement search and review technology for e-mail.

37% are already enforcing a formal retention policy for e-mail, while another 40% are currently in the planning stage to enforce a formal policy.

Another 36% of respondents are currently planning to create and enforce a formal “litigation hold” process for e-mail and other data.

37% of respondents conduct more than 21 searches through old e-mail to gather information for legal reasons each year.

Nearly half of respondents (40%) report that their organization searches through e-mail five or more times each year in response to a formal legal discovery request.

35% are not confident that e-mails are fully reviewed to ensure attorney-client privilege is not waived before being sent to opposing counsel during discovery.

Of those who are familiar with the costs of litigation, more than half (51%) claimed the average cost of litigation (excluding settlement costs) was over $200,000, with 8% putting the average cost over $1 million.

Sonian hears from many organizations their reluctance to deploy an on-premise installed archive solution is based on initial upfront costs for hardware, software and installation fees. When you layer on storage infrastructure to support terabytes of data stored securely and indexed for 3, 5, 7, and 10 year retention periods, installed archiving ownership costs rise dramatically.

It’s time for a fresh approach to solving this “man-made” problem. Implementing an archive solution shouldn’t be a budget-busting hardship for any organization.

We will be making some pricing announcements very soon that will prove our point.

Below is some background information and an update on the 2007 amendments.

The amendments were applied to Rules 16, 26, 33, 34, 37 and 45 and targeted at ESI. The amendments defined a new reality in how email is stored, retained and produced when called for. The amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are available at http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/newrules4.html.

Since the FRCP changes, the discovery of email for litigation has become a critical component of legal inquiries. In the past, organizations had to rely on much riskier manual processes to sift through enormous amounts of enterprise data located on production servers, backup tapes, removable media and desktops spread throughout the company. This approach left companies vulnerable because of the sheer volume of emails and files that must be found and sifted through with no assurance the information needed could be uncovered to meet legal requirements. To address the enormous drain on corporate resources, companies are adopting content archiving solutions to automate eDiscovery and rapidly uncover responsive email, files and other data in a cost effective manner to reduce costs and ensure compliance.

An interesting finding from the study focused on e-mail archiving: while 56% of respondents told us that deploying or improving their e-mail archiving capabilities for e-discovery purposes was important or extremely important, 67% told us that archiving for storage management was important.

… Parties in a lawsuit can now demand from each other word processing documents, e-mails, voice mail and instant messages, blogs, backup tapes and database files. [...] Failure to comply with these sundry electronic production obligations can lead to serious sanctions, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars.

Our #1 goal is to provide our customers with the most cost-effective archive solution possible. Meeting compliance and storage resource management goals should not be a “budget busting” expenditure.