Jim McGann, Index Engines, Holmdel, NJ
Information, including contracts, e-mail conversations, and intellectual property, is the lifeblood of every company. These records are typically very difficult for the legal department to obtain when the need arises due to the sheer volume and complexity of the corporate infrastructure. Finding an e-mail conversation that discussed offshore leases or the engineering specifications related to specific facilities can be a nightmare.
Over time, many legal teams have reluctantly accepted that finding specific files and e-mail on corporate networks is a lost cause. Going back in time two or three years ago to find a specific conversation between an engineering manager and a vendor has been next to impossible. As a result, legal teams are resigned to the fact that this information is inaccessible and cannot be collected in support of the current case at hand. Therefore, the use of the "undue burden" argument has become a standard tactic when faced with the time-consuming and expensive collection of electronically stored information (ESI).
However, the use of the burden argument is rapidly eroding. Technology is now in place that simplifies the complex task of finding and collecting relevant data in support of litigation. Many judges have become educated on this technology. Look at Judge Shira Scheindlin's opinion in the Pension Committee of the University of Montreal Pension Plan et al., v. Banc of America Securities LLC, et al., where the judge slapped the hands of plaintiffs who didn't come to court equipped with the data they needed.
How can you best manage this data and ensure you are prepared for current and future litigation? You should ask your IT department. They have been backing up this data for years. In fact, they have a snapshot of all important business records on backup tapes stockpiled offsite for safekeeping. These backup tapes represent a valuable repository of information, as well as a major liability, because all records, including sensitive content, are archived and may be requested by the courts.
Leveraging backup tapes
You need to take advantage of these historical backup tapes and cull the relevant data, loading it into a litigation hold database, and purge the remainder of the content that is no longer required. Doing this allows streamlined access to the data required to support current and future litigation, as well as controlling liability of unknown data hidden in these tapes.
Historically, this has been very expensive. However, new technology now makes access to legacy backup tape data affordable and simplified. Therefore, many organizations, especially energy firms facing oversight and scrutiny from federal agencies, are undergoing backup tape remediation to get their electronically stored information in order.
Access to legacy backup tape data has typically been expensive and painful. The only option was to employ the original software used to create the tapes to fully restore the content. This is a challenge as these tapes are old and the environment used to create them is usually no longer in place. Additionally, since less than 5% of the tape content are relevant business records, the rest being irrelevant documents and e-mail, moving the 95% of useless information from tape is a massive waste of time and resources.
A new intelligent, cost-effective method now exists to access backup tape data. This process bypasses the traditional restoration of the content, and scans the tapes to generate a searchable index of the content. Searching the full text index of the files and e-mail that exists on tape allows you to find relevant data based on content, dates, owner, and more.
Once you find what you need, the data can then be extracted from tape, even if it is only one e-mail. You can avoid moving the volume of junk from tape, and also negate the need to re-create the original backup environment. This new approach enables affordable, efficient access to historical records on tape for litigation and allows organizations to gain control of the unknown records on these historical tapes, and to remediate data and tapes that are not required based on corporate policy, hence controlling liability.
Consider remediation
The liability of unknown content on these tapes is something that keeps many people up at night. With government agencies looking over your shoulders and enforcing federal regulations, understanding the historical data assets on these tapes is important now more than ever. So how can your organization get this content under control? How can you remediate historical backup tapes in a defensible and affordable manner?
New intelligent tape discovery solutions have rendered tape remediation achievable in less time than an IT department can process tapes in house, find what legal needs, archive it, and make it available when needed. This efficient, cost-effective process enables tape remediation allowing IT departments to recapture tape storage budgets, while providing legal with the data they need.
Cull data quickly considering the following steps:
- Load tapes in a tape library; this will automate the process of reading the tape content and eliminate the manpower requirement to handle tapes.
- Scan tapes to determine the high-level content. You can eliminate up to 80% of the total tapes by purging blank tapes and those with non-user data or "incremental" network backups that are not required as the "full" backup is what you want.
- Perform a deep scan of the remaining tapes to fully index the content without ever moving anything from tape.
- Search the index, based on keywords and metadata, to find what is relevant: typically less than 5% of tape content.
- Extract relevant content from tape and load to litigation hold platform or archive, then recycle or shred the tapes.
The process of tape remediation is now reality, eliminating the requirement to have the original environment used to create the tapes. Not only will tape remediation control liability, but it will also save IT departments the expense of maintaining and storing these tapes, which can easily be millions of dollars annually.
A case study: automated tape processing
Imagine a situation where 10,000 tapes are stored by your IT organization — tapes containing valuable yet unknown records. Loading these tapes in a tape library will quickly produce a catalog — a basic guide as to the overall tape content. Analysis of this catalog will allow you to eliminate incremental backups, as well as backups of non-user data and blank tapes. This typically reduces the volume by 80%, turning a 10,000 tape job into a 2,000 tape job. Stopping here eliminates 80% of the tapes and achieves significant cost savings.
With cataloging complete, the balance of the tapes will now contain the relevant data. The challenge then is to separate relevant from useless content. This requires a full scan of the tapes, which does not change or move any data from tape. It simply generates a searchable index of the content. Legal teams can now search this index and find relevant data based on keyword and metadata searches.
Once the data has been searched, tagged and culled, it can then be extracted. The cost savings here is that the original environment that created the tape is no longer needed. Extraction of the content is done directly and allows only the migration of the relevant data (typically less than 5% of the total content) from tape. When this process is complete, the tapes can then be recycled.
Details of a 10,000 tape remediation project currently underway with a global energy provider with new automated technology are shown in Table 1.
If you combine the cost to store tapes offsite with the cost to acquire new tapes in support of the existing backup process, it equals $430,000 per year. As the volume of tapes grows each week, this number will continue to increase over time. The expenditure for manpower, tape libraries, tape indexing hardware and software will show an ROI in less than one year. This does not include any costs associated with ongoing litigation where tapes are pulled from storage for restoration. These litigation support costs could easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, which would result in an accelerated ROI.
Conclusion
In the past, it was not cost-effective to remediate the mountains of tape stored offsite. Alongside the cost concern is also the need to archive documents that grant energy companies the land access they need. New technology now makes it feasible to identify what to keep and what is no longer needed, and remediation is quickly becoming a best practice for any organization that is faced with constant legal events. As legal and IT work together, tape remediation is quickly becoming the preferred method to reduce corporate liability and expand what IT can accomplish despite its ever-shrinking budget.
About the author
Jim McGann is vice president of information discovery at Index Engines, a tape discovery and remediation company based in Holmdel, NJ. McGann is a frequent speaker on the topic of electronic discovery and has authored multiple articles for legal technology and information management publications.
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