Data restoration and migration services for compliance and e-discovery

Whitepaper

The factors that can make e-discovery costs skyrocket are well known to legal teams. One of these factors is the scope of discovery, which often extends to a company's legacy backup tapes.

11 March 201912 min
Data Restoration And Migration Services For Backup Replacement

Legal teams want...

The factors that can make e-discovery costs skyrocket are well known to legal teams. One of these factors is the scope of discovery, which often extends to a company’s legacy backup tapes. Despite the best efforts of the legal and IT teams, costs can mushroom to include the re-creation of now-obsolete software and hardware environments required by these legacy tapes. It can also attract high resource expenses with in-house IT staff searching for and restoring data, often over an extended period. Finding e-discovery data in backup tapes is simply not a smooth, repeatable or manageable process.

The business challenges

Could this scenario be the IT department’s worst nightmare? The Chief Legal Counsel advises the Chief Information Officer that the organisation is facing litigation and that the brand damage alone from the court case will be considerable. An urgent e-discovery exercise is needed to find and retrieve documents and emails that may go back years, from the data repositories across the business.

The problem is that much of the data is no longer available online. The organisation had transitioned its IT platforms to the public cloud and migrated from Microsoft Exchange to Office 365. Much of the legacy data was culled during the migration process.

The challenges of legacy media

As technology evolves, access to older tape media is a challenge. Modern LTO drives generally offer compatibility for two generations. However, critical data may be stored in legacy backups that are five, or more years old. Existing data centre infrastructure can no longer read these. Time is money. How can the IT department facilitate timely recovery for an e-discovery request?

Knowing what legacy backup data an organisation possesses is critical when faced with an audit, litigation or discovery request. However keeping track is no easy task. Today, media libraries are larger, more complex and include multiple media types. An organisation can be vulnerable to considerable financial and brand risk while IT struggles to locate and retrieve the required data.

When faced with e-discovery requests, IT departments must divert resources from day-to-day activities to analyse legacy backup catalogues searching for relevant data. When the information is found, it is often necessary to recover the data and its associated metadata in a manner that is legally defensible. This means the data or its metadata must not be modified in any way due to the recovery process.

This “legally defensible” recovery requirement places the recovery process beyond almost every IT department’s capabilities and makes the job of the legal team doubly difficult.

Iron Mountain's approach

Iron Mountain Data Restoration and Migration Services (DRMS) enables the recovery of data from tape media written in any common commercially available format. This gives IT departments the ability to “box up and pack away” the old approach to data management and yet still be able to access legacy backup data on demand.

Customer benefits

Iron Mountain DRMS offers customers a unique value proposition and removes the requirement to maintain legacy systems. In the event of a need for e-discovery, data can be easily and independently identified and recovered from the legacy tape media format. This process is performed by data recovery experts, and avoids any day-to-day operational disruption to an organisation’s application systems.

Conclusion

By eliminating dependency on legacy tape-based business continuity solutions, customers can free up the financial and personnel resources associated with managing historical solutions. The focus can then shift to business innovation and new solutions.

Customers maintain ongoing access to legacy data, which mitigates brand damage and reputational risk in the event of litigation and helps to satisfy any requirements for regulatory oversight. Collaborating with a reputable provider ensures that data is kept securely in vaults with a secure chain-of-custody and absolute compliance.

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