It used to be so easy. You had your data and your customers’ data, and you stored it on your servers in the company’s data center, religiously backing it up and ensuring secure access to the corporate data and customer information.
Things have changed. Now your data is likely to be on someone else’s server, stored in the cloud. You’re probably aware of all the usual availability, privacy, and security issues surrounding cloud storage, but do you know your legal responsibilities for that data? You had better learn them – starting with the technology you need to put in place for e-discovery.
“Organizations should be careful to ensure that a cloud service provider has the ability to efficiently store and retrieve data from the cloud. A provider should have the technological capacity to reduce data stockpiles like traditional on-premise archiving software,” says Philip J. Favro, Discovery Counsel for Symantec, which recently acquired the legal e-discovery business Clearwell. “That means having deduplication functionality as well as the ability to implement company retention policies. Intelligently organizing and storing data in this fashion will more likely enable organizations to timely respond to e-discovery requests and other legal demands.”