Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) is the process of locating, searching and securing electronically stored information (ESI) so that it may be used as evidence in a court of law. eDiscovery information may be generated by applications like word processors, database systems, spreadsheets, email, images, audio, video and any other electronic format. In some situations, forensic investigation may be utilized to find or recover data that may have been accidentally or deliberately hidden, encrypted or deleted.
Regulatory compliance acts as well as court ordered requests for ESI has presented all organizations with a significant business and technical challenge. Many organizations poorly manage the storage of their ever increasing volumes of information and records. Often, electronic files are stored on shared network drives, multiple servers, personal workstations and even USB memory devices without a centralized policy for naming the files, classifying them, assigning metadata to help with search operations, or the retention and proper disposition of older records. Email is a frequent target of eDiscovery requests and many organizations have faced significant difficulties in being able to locate and efficiently search through years of email messages and attachments.
Failure to adequately comply with legal eDiscovery requests, whether by being late in assembling all the required information, or by missing some information, can make the organization and even its senior management liable for severe financial penalties and in some cases, the risk of imprisonment!
At Enara Technologies, we have many years of expertise in information management that assists organizations of all sizes to properly capture, classify, index and store all information and records safely and efficiently. Our solutions can assign metadata to each document or record, and can also capture the contents of email, application files and scanned images to enable searching by any word or phrase that appears in any document.
Our solutions also handle all storage management transparently even in a distributed environment where a large enterprise might operate multiple storage servers in many locations across the country or around the world. Our eDiscovery solutions allow very rapid search and access to information no matter where the actual document (or email) might be. The effort to manage compliance and disclosure requests can thus be significantly reduced from weeks (or months) to a few days or less.
Furthermore, by implementing an enterprise wide information management solution that maintains access security on the entire document lifecycle, with detailed audit tracking on all operations that touch any record or email, and by enforcing the organization's policies on record retention and disposition, the organization is able to respond rapidly not just to legal eDiscovery matters, but can become far more efficient in accessing its own knowledge pool, and also more able to efficiently handle customer issues.
Contact Enara today to learn how we can help you with your information management and eDiscovery requirements.