How to avoid high-profile discovery ‘train wrecks’

By Symantec

Symantec and a leading global investment management firm review the challenges financial firms face related to document retention and discovery, and how IT can best retain and protect corporate information while reducing storage costs and simplifying management.

Introduction
Its infrastructure, to put it charitably, was fragmented. Each of the company’s three main locations had its own email application, directory service, and phone system. Demonstrating compliance with government regulations and responding to discovery requests were eating up staff time and incurring outside costs, putting a drag on operations and profitability.

For example, responding to compliance audits and discovery motions involved the following: The company had to request the backup tapes for the relevant time period and then rebuild the original file systems, a process that could take days. Then it would print out the information and send the documents to an outside vendor, who would go through it page by page, searching for particular words and phrases or categories of information.

This procedure swallowed up resources – including servers, disk space, network bandwidth, and, most importantly, IT staff time – that could have been dedicated to more productive uses. Moreover, manual retention and expiry processes are prone to human error, a particular problem in litigation. Demonstrating a good faith and automated system for the retention and expiry of electronically stored information can potentially protect an organization from sanctions when it is unable to produce certain data. Without this type of routine operation, the presumption is often that the respondent is acting in bad faith. The risk of sanctions can be reduced by implementing a system for document and retention management alongside an ability to immediately suspend that system in the event of anticipated litigation.

As part of a major IT initiative, the investment management firm identified email and document archiving, e-discovery, and compliance as critical areas to address. It worked with Symantec Global Services to deploy a solution based on Symantec Enterprise Vault, which includes Compliance Accelerator, Microsoft Exchange Journaling, and File System Archiving options. Archiving policy covers email, instant messaging, file and print server data, and Bloomberg Professional IM. The result? A business value analysis study by an independent research group pinpointed millions of dollars in cost savings, productivity gains, and cost avoidance.

This company’s experience wasn’t unique. For financial services companies everywhere, the growth in volume and variety of electronic communication is matched only by growing demands for discovery to support litigation.

The data explosion
No challenge is as daunting for today’s IT departments as getting a handle on the explosive growth of business information. Take the company described above. Its volume of email has doubled every year since 2001. Other information – databases and file-based information – is growing nearly as fast.

At the same time, IT managers must be concerned by the proliferation of regulatory- and discovery-sensitive information that is carried on laptop computers, cell phones, PDAs, memory cards, flash drives, and even consumer devices such as multimedia players.

These trends put obvious strains on any company’s storage infrastructure as well as its business continuity strategy.

“The financial services industry has been in the vanguard when it comes to monitoring and retaining broker-dealer email and IM communications. This was the first wave,” says Sean Regan, Enterprise Vault Product Marketing Manager at Symantec. “Now, e-discovery requirements driven by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure span the entire organization.”

As a result, IT is looking for ways to reduce the enormous amounts of duplicate data that are unnecessarily filling up expensive storage systems. And as IT departments know all too well, storage plays a significant role in creating the space, power, and cooling problems that have pushed many data centers to their breaking points.

“Financial services companies need to start looking at retention and expiry strategically,” says Regan. “They’ve got to be smart about retention policies. After all, not all email is created equal.”

Consider Russell Investment Group. Like virtually all financial services companies, Russell views email as critical to its operations. But email volume is also increasing steadily (in Russell’s case, 60% annually).

Two years ago, Russell, headquartered in Tacoma, Washington, deployed Symantec Enterprise Vault. As Enterprise Vault offloads archived email from Microsoft Exchange-based servers, it compresses messages and stores multiple instances of an attachment only once. The result has been a 45% reduction in Russell’s email store. In addition, backup and recovery times have been slashed. Russell estimates that its ability to recover email service is now 75% faster.

Avoid discovery ‘train wrecks’
The importance of taking a smart, strategic approach to email archiving and recovery can’t be emphasized enough. Consider the case of the American who flew to Europe last year even though he had tuberculosis. As InfoWorld reported last July:

“The Fulton County, Georgia, Department of Health and Wellness tried to prevent Andrew Speaker, of Atlanta, from traveling to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon in May because his drug-resistant form of TB could make him contagious to other airline passengers.

Speaker has said in media interviews that he had not been told he couldn’t fly. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper covering the case filed an open records request with Fulton County Georgia Government to disclose e-mail messages among health officials in which Speaker’s case was discussed.

Fulton County uses Symantec’s Enterprise Vault software.

‘All I basically had to do was say. ... I want any e-mails retrieved for me that involved the name Andrew Speaker,’ said Rich Diller, e-mail administrator for Fulton County.”

Ultimately, Enterprise Vault retrieved some 200 pages of email correspondence related to Speaker’s case in just 90 minutes – thereby sparing Fulton County any untoward publicity.

“You don’t want any high-profile discovery train wrecks or fishing expeditions,” adds Regan. “Especially with the anticipated level of sub-prime lending litigation, you’ve got to know what you have, where it is, and how to get it.”

In recent years, Merrill Lynch and Co., Morgan Stanley, and UBS Warburg, to name just three high-profile firms, have been penalized for various e-discovery missteps.

Optimizing storage resources
Symantec Enterprise Vault provides an archiving platform that stores, manages, and enables the discovery of corporate data from email systems, file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and collaboration and content management systems. Recognizing that not all data is created equal, Enterprise Vault utilizes intelligent classification and retention technologies to capture, categorize, index, and store target data in accordance with governance and regulatory requirements while helping to reduce storage costs and streamline e-discovery.

Specifically, Enterprise Vault enables organizations to rationalize their storage resources and dedicate primary storage to dynamic and transactional data. Older, less frequently accessed content can be moved to a secondary or tertiary storage device, saving money for more strategic purposes. Data that is no longer required can then be expired according to the corporate retention policy.

Conclusion
The pressure on all organizations to protect and manage data has intensified with the recent growth in unstructured data and the reliance on email to communicate and exchange documents. Email is a mission-critical application.

Symantec solutions can help financial services companies collect and retain unstructured content, effectively prepare for discovery, and comply with document policies and regulations.

Related Links:
Symantec Enterprise Vault
Success Story: ING Investment Management

Listen to the podcast for this article below: How to Avoid High-Profile Discovery ‘Train Wrecks’

Contact details:
David Krauss, Sr. Manager, Global Financial Services
T: +1 408-836-1687, E: david_krauss@symantec.com, W: enterprise.symantec.com