Tuesday, March 06, 2007

E-discovery & The Data Center

Processor Editorial Article - E-discovery & The Data Center: "With the potential exception of lawyers, no one likes lawsuits. Legal fees and costly verdicts are only half the problem; EDD (electronic data discovery) is the rest. Even in small lawsuits, EDD can be a six-figure bill. No wonder, then, that words such as “headache” and “nightmare” are used to describe it.

Consider the mind-bending range of data that EDD can encompass: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, emails, IMs, CRM, and ERP apps and even a department-level Access database. Every PDF, Web site, intranet, and extranet may need to be searched. And don’t forget about wikis and blogs, internal and external alike. If you’ve deployed unified messaging, even voicemails could be subject to search.

Nor is that data in one place. To complete an EDD request, you may have to rummage through file servers, email servers, SANs, mirrors, archives, and backup tapes (whose stubbornness is legendary), not to mention hundreds or even thousands of endpoint hard drives. Do you use an ASP? A colocation vendor? Better give them a call, too. "

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