Storage Goes to Law School

NEW YORK -- Storage Decisions -- As the U.S. corporate world becomes increasingly litigious, storage managers should get their systems ready to serve on the front lines of impending legal battles, warned Michael Clark, managing director of analyst firm EDDix, during a presentation here today.

"You have a need to find, collect, store, and process documents," cautioned the former Citibank and ITT exec. "All too often, the documents that you need are on backup tapes, or they are sitting on someone's desktop or laptop."

Email archiving, for example, has already proved to be crucial in at least one high-profile legal dispute, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) slamming Morgan Stanley with a $15 million fine when it was unable to produce email evidence in court. (See A Fine Mess.)

Some 90 percent of U.S. firms are involved in some form of legal action, according to Clark, and the average company today is handling 37 different pieces of litigation at any one time. Larger billion-dollar firms, however, are usually juggling around 140 different pieces of litigation, he explained.

Attendees at the event admitted that the legal landscape is prompting some major storage changes within their organizations. "It's a pain point -- we're looking at a strategy for how to prepare for litigation before it occurs," said an IT director from a Connecticut-based HR services firm, who asked not to be named. "Email archiving is a major initiative for us now, and we're looking to integrate file archiving under that effort."To make things even more difficult, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which govern civil law suits, are about to be tightened up around electronic data. As of December first, says Clark, the rules will define exactly which pieces of data will be needed from the outset of legal proceedings.

"It's not just emails. It's not just office documents. It's databases, voicemails, and edge devices," he explained. "In the past, you had to get fairly well down the road of litigation before you had to address this issue of electronic data discovery."

Additionally, users must produce more information about individual documents, which will inevitably increase the strain on storage managers. Metadata will now be expected as a matter of course. "Now people will want all the information about the document, who has touched it, and how it has been changed," explained Clark.

Users, according to the analyst, should think about using nearline storage to identify and access their data quickly. (See The Year in Insecurity, A Tale of Lost Tapes, and NASA Goes to the Dark Side.) "This has a critical role in compliance and litigation control," he added.

The analyst also had some other tips for helping storage managers deal with litigation. One of the most important first steps in any legal dispute, he said, should be the immediate suspension of backup tape recycling. IT managers should also take snapshots of any database that may contain relevant information and store them somewhere.But litigation is not all doom and gloom for storage managers, according to Clark. "It's an opportunity," he said, adding that CIOs can exploit the situation to get funds that may not otherwise have been available. "You will have a lot of new resources and corporate will behind you."

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch