The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Compliance: Traditional Backups Ill-Suited for Compliance
Nightly backups might fit in your category of being ‘good enough’ for managing the risk of data loss due to disaster or malfunction. But companies are finding that just the fact that they are doing backups can put them in the crosshairs of eDiscovery investigations. 70% of backups are used for recovering information that was accidentally deleted, and judges are now ruling that because of that there is a sufficient level of ‘accessibility’ to make backup tapes just another repository that must be included as part of an eDiscovery search.
The problem is that traditional backups are very ill-suited for eDiscovery and that searching old backups quickly becomes extremely expensive. To search a backup, the media must first be restored and then once restored, often the search tools available to scan the restored data are poor. Backups are computer snapshots in time and many companies keep them for many months into the past. What often happens too is that backups are kept for long periods, even after the point when the hardware on which the backup was made has been retired for newer equipment. Restores of the older backup is often only possible with the original or equivalent hardware on which the backup was made.
Many companies are finding that eDiscovery when applied to backups can drive costs into the many hundreds of thousands of dollars. The alternative is to be more smart about backing up data. Many companies are switching to active archiving. Active archiving sets up a central repository for handling all information. Policies are established that will cause data to flow from other systems into the archive. And once centrally maintained, it is much easier to manage retention and storage policies. To say nothing of the costs saved in being able to perform rapid searches for eDiscovery…
