Started in 2005, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project was created to address the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market.  EDRM is a great reference tool to develop guidelines and standards for ediscovery consumers and service providers.  EDRM helps reduce the cost, time and manual work associated with ediscovery.

Referencing the  accompanying EDRM diagram on their web site, the 8 areas lay out a structured foundation for facilitating the implementation of an archiving software solution.  This makes life easier with providing all the players standard guidelines, as part of the archiving and information retrieval process related to legal and government requests.

We will cover a cursory overview of EDRM.

Information Management
Getting your electronic house in order to mitigate risk and expenses should electronic discovery become an issue. This covers the initial creation of electronically stored information all the way through its final disposition.

Identification
This refers to the process of learning the location of all data which a company has a duty to preserve and potentially disclose in an upcoming  legal proceeding.

Preservation
Preservation for electronic discovery has become a complicated, multi-faceted, steadily-changing concept in recent years.  Certain suggested standards and guidelines have been emerging to provide checklists for those preparing to respond to electronic requests for production.

Collection
The acquisition of electronic information, which is  tagged as potentially relevant in the identification phase. Continue reading EDRM Guides Archive Strategy

Recently I had an opportunity to meet with an associate and email administrator in New York City named Lisa Bruno.  She and her team are involved in a Lotus Notes-to-Microsoft Exchange migration.  Lisa shared some interesting insights.  Having recently migrated to Exchange 2007, one of the many questions we find is ‘what to use for backup?’.  Within Exchange you can set a “Local Continuous Replication”.   It takes an exact replica of the storage group.  Now the question is, since Local Continuous Replication is set do we need third party backup software?   In response to that question, we determined that yes we still need a backup solution.  By no means should LCR be considered as the only form of backup.  LCR also compliments any implemented archiving solutions by adding an extra utility for maintaining data integrity. Data integrity is crucial to just that one instance when archived data must be retrieved due to a legal inquiry. While it does give that option and helps in recovering quickly, it should not be the end of all.

Continue reading Microsoft Exchange LCR Compliments Archiving