Email backup tape rotation (and related issues concerning over-retention of electronically stored information) is the most complex records and information management challenges organizations face today.
Backup tapes should be used only for disaster recovery, but many organizations still use those media for archives, retention or storage, with a trend toward increased use of archive storage technologies. Archiving does not solve the information lifecycle challenges organizations face and the more information retained the more that is subject to collateral legal disclovery.
Legal/compliance departments must be in lockstep with IT/RIM departments in terms of development and enforcement of policy and procedures concerning backup tapes. Flawless execution on litigation holds is essential to mitigation of legal and financial risk.
This is a take-no-prisoner compliance area and courts are not accepting the “keystone cops” defense anymore. All organizations need to tighten up and audit their procedures for backup tape rotation, establish high-level catalogues/inventories of existing tapes; or develop policy and procedures if they have no policy and procedures in place (ASAP). Keeping everything is not a good alternative, and once you access information on email backup tapes, for whatever reason, it is difficult to argue in court that you cannot produce information from those tapes on the basis that the ESI is not reasonably accessible.
Filed under: ECM, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Law department management, e-Discovery | Tagged: Corporate governance, Data Privacy and Security, Litigation management, Records Management Policy Development
[...] to Preserve , Document Retention , Discovery , Data Management , email In this post, DataKos looks for a silver bullet formula for tape storage and backup rotations: Backup tapes should be used only for disaster recovery, but [...]
DataMills may have part of this silver bulet backup for files and emails.