Out-Law News 3 min. read

E-disclosure rules demand better database backups, warns Forrester


Companies which fail to employ sophisticated backup systems for their databases could find it hard to comply with legal requests for information, according to IT research company Forrester.

The company has published research commissioned by database archiving firm Clearpace Software. Forrester said that companies needed to be able to make their database systems comply with onerous requests for information in legal cases, or e-disclosure.

“An archival system becomes critical when you need to access archived information in response to a legal summons, customer service issue, security investigation or technical issue. The value of archiving grows considerably as it becomes easier to access the archived data," said Noel Yuhanna, principal analyst at Forrester Research, in the report.

Requests for e-disclosure often refer to email or documents held by a firm, but Clearpace believes the same care over storage and accessibility needs to be taken over other kinds of information produced by a firm.

"It is critical that IT managers place the same priority on the long term retention and retrieval of structured data, as they do on managing email and document archives," said a statement from Clearpace.

E-disclosure expert Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that court disclosure of all kinds of electronic information was set to change the technological landscape for large firms.

"Archiving technologies and e-discovery solutions are set to converge with increasing pace. All forms of corporate data are potentially disclosable in litigation, as part of an internal investigation or pursuant to a request from a regulator or law enforcement agency," he said. "An organisation needs the ability to access this data quickly and intelligently in compliance with legal and regulatory requirements."

The Forrester research found that companies have traditionally been faced with two options for database storage. They can keep all their database information live and online, but this is more expensive and less secure than it needs to be for information that is not commonly needed.

The other option has been the use of backup systems such as tape systems which are cheaper and more secure but can make it hard to retrieve information.

"With each of these types of archive, little or no emphasis is placed on maintaining long term integrity or usability of the archived data," said the Clearpace statement. "Data retrieval times for data stored offsite on tape for example are typically measured in days, if not several weeks. Furthermore the costs of dedicating developer resource to rebuild systems and data structures can outweigh the value that was supposed to be safeguarded by purging the production database."

The problem is exacerbated, the research found, by the exponential growth in the amounts of information stored in databases.

"With online transactional data and repositories growing more than 50% annually for most enterprises, data management challenges are also increasing," said the Forrester research. "In some vertical industries, such as retail and financial services, the data growth is even higher – well beyond 100% growth annually."

"Many large enterprises have petabytes of data stored in online transactional repositories and continue to raise the bar, approaching exabytes," it said.

Clearpace proposes systems such as its database archiving software as the solution to that problem. Surguy said that many large companies had already tried archiving and e-discovery technologies.

"Many global businesses have already sought to deploy this technology to mitigate the risk associated with holding corporate data out of concern for the cost of answering compulsory disclosure demands, particularly the high-profile organisations who are heavily regulated or susceptible to heavy-weight litigation," he said.

"Smaller, less-regulated entities would also do well to conduct a risk-assessment around the exposures associated with the presence within the organisation of large volumes of structured and especially unstructured data," he said.

Surguy said, though, that the most important element in systems was a well thought-out information plan.

"Only information that has to be legally or operationally retained should be retained at all. A well-planned document retention policy involving all relevant stakeholders should be created, implemented, maintained and enforced as a matter of good corporate governance," he said. "Information management is now reaching the boardroom as a key corporate risk to be managed and it is incumbent on the legal function to collaborate with the other functions within an organisation to understand what solutions are best able to manage the risks of orderly and timely information retrieval and production." 

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