Today's IT organizations need to be prepared to meet the
electronic discovery (eDiscovery) requirements enacted by the
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). With Actiance eDiscovery
compliance solutions, you can respond effectively and minimize IM,
unified communications (UC), and social networking risks and
liability while benefiting from proven integration with your
existing storage, email, and records retention systems.
What is eDiscovery?
Effective December 1, 2006, a number of substantive revisions
were made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). Some of
the most significant changes appear in Rule 26, which governs the
production of evidence in most federal court cases, and in
particular as the rule applies to electronic stored information
(ESI). ESI covers any and all information that can be stored
electronically - including email, instant messaging threads, Skype
chats, social media transcripts and other forms of electronic
communication. In a nutshell, the changes to the FRCP require
organizations to manage their data in such a way that this data can
be produced in a timely and complete manner when necessary during
legal discovery proceedings.
Provisions of the FRCP require companies involved in
litigation:
- To be prepared to discuss how and where they store
their ESI early in the pretrial proceedings
- To preserve their ESI in a compliant manner and
produce it with specified metadata intact
- To produce their ESI quickly according to discovery
timelines
Preserving electronic evidence requires IT action because
routine storage and archiving operations can alter and destroy such
evidence.
The Risks of Non-Compliance
Unlike some more specific compliance regulations, eDiscovery
rules affect every type of company in every industry. If you can be
sued in a federal court, then the rules apply. Failure to comply
can mean fines, sanctions, executive liability, and other
far-reaching effects on business and the bottom line.
Backup vs. Retrieval
It's important to realize that backups are not
archives when it comes to retrieval. A properly configured
and managed archive makes it simple to locate the required
documents, whereas a 'brute-force' backup system will likely
require companies to hire information recovery experts to perform
the same task. The cost of hiring in this type of expertise can
cost as much as $3,500 per backup tape.
Larger organizations have adopted archiving for their email
records to assist in meeting the compliance requirements of other
regulations, but far fewer have adopted the same disciplined
approach to instant messaging and other real-time communications
records. In these days of multi-channel communications, a unified
system of electronic messaging archival that not only encompasses
the requirements of all relevant compliance legislation but also
the content generated by all electronic messaging systems (email,
instant messaging, VoIP and Web conferencing chat logs, P2P
conversations, and more).
Learn more about the eDiscovery regulations and how your
business can prepare. Download the Actiance white paper The Impact of the New
FRCP Amendments on Your Business by Osterman Research.
How Actiance Can Help
Actiance's real-time communications solutions are designed to
help companies meet the strictest of regulatory and corporate
compliance requirements.
| Feature |
Benefit |
| Log and archive all real-time communications
conversations, file transfers, and associated metadata in a
centralized, tamper-proof environment |
Reduce costs from having to piece together
conversations from PCs, backup tapes, servers, smartphones, USBs,
and other devices |
| Auditing and easy retrieval of stored
information based on granular searches of keywords, users, time
frames, and more |
Meet eDiscovery deadlines and minimize
financial exposure; integrates with existing email storage and
archiving systems |
| Enforce company policy to exclude or block
the use of public IM, P2P, and other unmanaged real-time
communications |
Prevent the existence of relevant IM, UC,
and social media - records that may be missed and undermine company
policy |
Additionally, as the only solution that offers
TrueCompliance™, Actiance specifically addresses the
following requirements for e-Discovery compliance:
- Message anti-tampering checksums for non-repudiation
- Full binary message capture for hidden messages
- File transfer archival
- Real-time ethical boundaries
- Guaranteed message order preservation
- Guaranteed delivery to audit database and archival system
- Enforcement and validation of the audit trail
- Seamless integration with major email compliance and WORM
storage systems
- 360-degree audit of all users including system administrators
and content reviewers
Many of the world's leading enterprises are using Actiance
solutions to help them meet compliance regulations without breaking
the bank. Find out how your company can benefit from this approach
today.
Learn more about Actiance products for
management, control, and eDiscovery compliance of real-time
communications in the enterprise.