Enterprises face new e-discovery rules
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Demand for data storage and retrieval products will increase thanks to new rules governing how digital documents are gathered for civil cases in U.S. federal courts.
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Over the next few years, corporations will face tough decisions on how to store growing amounts of data and find information.
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Put off by restrictions Google and Microsoft want to place on new digital collections, several major libraries are instead signing on with a group that aims to make the materials broadly available.
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(InfoWorld) - Demand for data storage and retrieval products will increase thanks to new rules governing how digital documents are gathered for civil cases in U.S. federal courts. Among other things, the amended Federal Rules for Civil Procedures (FRCP) delineate how enterprises must respond when compelled to produce documents in a lawsuit. They also let judges decide whether a records request puts an undue financial burden on an enterprise. The updated FRCPs take effect in federal courts on Dec. 1, but individual states are in various stages of implementing some or all of the same rules in their own court systems. California, New Hampshire and Maryland are in the process of adopting these so-called "e-discovery" rules; changes took effect in Idaho July 1. New Jersey's new rules went into effect on Friday. The rule changes focus new attention on technology to catalogue, retrieve and restore documents stored on backup tapes or hard drives. These e-discovery rules, on top of data retention requirements under Sarbanes-Oxley for public firms, HIPAA for health-care enterprises and other regulations, should further spur the already robust data storage and retrieval market. The e-mail archiving market -- most of the documents sought in a corporate lawsuit are e-mails -- is expected to grow to US$7.8 billion by 2010, from $796 million by the end of 2006, according to research firm The Radicati Group Inc. Zantaz Inc., a seller of information retention and discovery management software and services, unveiled this week a tape cataloging service. Cataloging backup tapes can help an enterprise comply with one new e-discovery requirement, said Francis Lambert, senior compliance advisor at Zantaz, in Pleasanton, California. It requires that the IT staff of a company being sued meet with the company's lawyers and opposing counsel early in the discovery process after the suit is filed. The IT professionals need to be able to explain where records being sought are located, in what format and how they can be retrieved, said Lambert. This puts a new onus on an enterprise to get a handle on its document system, he said. "It's important that the IT people be able to inform the company and their counsel what's in their system. They need to better arm themselves for their pretrial conference," Lambert said. Better cataloging can save the cost of restoring documents from dozens of tapes if the enterprise is able to identify the one tape that contains the requested documents. New technology has made tape restoration less expensive, said Kris Haworth , the managing director of the Law and Economics Consulting Group, which advises clients on compliance issues. The firm is advising clients being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly backdating stock options. Since some of those cases date to the mid-1990s, a lot of e-mails are on backup tapes, she said. "It used to be $1,000 a tape to restore, but now it's in the hundreds of dollars," Haworth said. Judges have the authority to decide that requested documents are inaccessible because reproducing them would impose an "undue burden" on the company asked to provide the information. But as the cost of data retrieval goes down, "it's going to become very difficult to argue that the data is inaccessible," Haworth said. The new rules could also spur sales of hard disk storage hardware for data protection and retrieval, said Manish Goel, vice president and general manager of data protection and retention at Network Appliance Inc., a Sunnyvale, California-based storage device maker. Seventy to 80 percent of the files stored on enterprise networks are "unstructured data," Goel said, such as Word documents, PDFs (Portable Document Formats), Excel files. Network Appliance introduced software modules Aug. 14 to its Information Server 1200, designed to find that unstructured data, which the company introduced in November 2005.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Responding to a scourge of online fraud and identity theft that threatens to undermine public confidence in Internet commerce, major companies are rolling out new services to encourage the adoption of better technology to identify customers, business partners, and employees online.
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As a new PLM rollout is planned, a new requirement suddenly crops up. Data will be shared with outsiders, and Mathias Thurman wants it all done securely.
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Allowing consumers to search the content of books online could shift the balance of power between companies that produce books and those that sell them.
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New e-commerce and marketing tools will help small businesses sell their products and services online.
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Do patents, white papers, and other publications authored by search engine employees provide clear guidance to how to optimize Web pages?  A panel of experts debated the issue at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference.
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Companies that help businesses track and search their e-mails and other electronic data are experiencing a surge of interest in the wake of federal rule changes that clarify requirements to produce such evidence in lawsuits.
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New guidelines to bring order to the global Internet domain name market and enhance the flow of electronic commerce came into effect on Friday.
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Companies will demonstrate how their technology will work together.
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The e-commerce transaction processor now targets the lucrative small-business market.
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Enterprises face dual 2005 deadlines relating to RFID and supply-chain data synchronization. Those that haven&#39;t moved forward with a product-information-management strategy will be under-prepared to realize RFID&#39;s value.
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Several new online services  have emerged with their own takes on digital music discovery.
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Its new enterprise search appliance has more tagging and customization.
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New rules on broadband switching seem to have speeded up the process of moving net firms.