Email Archiving in the Zeitgeist

Email archiving, e-Discovery and associated concepts and concerns seem to be "in the air" a lot here at the start of 2009. One great example: Andrew Conry-Murray over at InformationWeek has a very interesting blog post up today about a $6 million e-Discovery mistake. Says Andrew: 

A government agency was compelled to spend $6 million on an e-discovery exercise for a case in which it wasn't even a party. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) was subpoenaed for documents in litigation involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

While the subpoena isn't unusual, the cost associated with the search was -- $6 million, which OFHEO says was 9% of its total yearly budget!

... The plaintiffs came up with 400 search terms, which yielded about 660,000 documents. In addition to bearing the IT costs of having to restore and search the backup tapes, the OFHEO then had to hire 50 contract lawyers to go through all those documents to find responsive material.

OFHEO ran into delays and missed more than one court-ordered deadline to produce the relevant information. Eventually the plaintiffs asked the court to sanction OFHEO for contempt, which it did.

This is just the latest example of how incredibly costly e-Discovery efforts can be when one has to resort to more-or-less manual backup search processes. For more detail and analysis of this case, see attorney Ralph Losey's fascinating analysis, which inspired Andrew's IW post. Losey notes that the overly broad search terms that OFHEO agreed to resulted in the retrieval of approximately 80% of all of the agency's email!

This is one of those situations where a modern email archiving solution could have saved—literally—millions of dollars and coutless hours of "retrieve backup - restore - search - repeat."

But that only helps if you already have an email archiving system deployed. Presumably, the Bush White House is headed for a similar effort (hopefully not as costly to the American taxpayer) as two separate Federal courts have slammed the outgoing administration with orders to preserve and promptly discover various email messages:

The AP reported Thursday that federal court Magistrate Judge John Facciola "tore into the Bush White House... over the issue of millions of apparently missing e-mails, saying the administration failed in its obligation to safeguard all electronic messages." His claim is that the White House has ignored the court's e-Discovery order to search "a full range of locations for all electronic messages that may be missing."

And on Wednesday, CNN reported that U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy issued an email preservation order and instructed officials to search all White House workstations "and to collect and preserve all e-mails sent or received between March 2003 and October 2005."

For an example of an organization taking a positive and proactive approach to e-Discovery readiness, check out Byte and Switch's case study on investment bank Cowen and Co.'s deployment of Proofpoint Email Archiving. 

Oh, and if you missed it on Wednesday, you can check out a replay of Proofpoint's webinar on "The Truth About Email Archiving," featuring analyst Michael Osterman discussing the reasons to deploy email archiving solutions and the advantages of SaaS solutions in particular.