Survey: Increased Need for Email Archiving

TORONTO -- According to a recent survey conducted by Osterman Research for email archiving provider Fortiva, email discovery requests are putting a significant strain on IT resources. The survey shows that IT departments face an average of 20 litigation-related requests annually; for organizations with over 1000 employees that number jumps to 32 litigation-related requests each year. In addition to legal discovery requests, the survey reports that IT departments receive an average of 36 business requests, 24 regulatory or audit-related requests, and 108 end-user requests annually.

“The number of requests to recover email has risen sharply over the past decade, but very few businesses have a true understanding of the impact this is having on their IT resources,” said Eric Goodwin, CEO, Fortiva. “These statistics reinforce why so many companies are now turning to email archiving to simplify data retrieval. With an archive in place, a discovery request that used to take months can be competed in under a day – and the exposure to legal risks is significantly reduced.”

According to the survey, retrieving raw email data for a single legal discovery request takes almost a month. Since this does not take into account the time required for a legal review of the data, IT teams may also be required to spend additional time supporting the legal discovery review.

“Based on our research, 75 percent of businesses are still relying on backup tapes to recover information for discovery. This is concerning not only because tapes can be very time-consuming to restore, but also because they have a high rate of failure and corruption – which can make it impossible to satisfy a request,” said Michael Osterman, Osterman Research. “By eliminating the need to restore from backups, PSTs and email servers, an email archive is becoming a requirement for businesses that want to safely respond to discovery requests for legal and business reasons.”

Osterman Research

Fortiva Inc.