Information is essential to managing a business. However, with information comes risk. The risk relates to compliance, security, privacy of the information, and supporting evidence for ongoing and future litigation. Most litigation focuses on e-mail, but the changes driven by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) do not focus on e-mail alone. All electronic stored information (ESI) is now admissible –ranging from paper documents, images, correspondence, text messages, data warehouses, voice mails, statements, MS Office documents, etc. Legal departments are looking for ways of disposing unnecessary information and ensuring the organization is compliant to the approved corporate retention schedule.

There is a very well known case study by DuPont detailing the costs when companies do not have a proactive lifecycle management process. The case study concluded over 39 million documents were reviewed during litigation that were past their retention period which cost $12 million. Many times, an organization is forced to either settle a legal matter simply to avoid excessive legal expenses necessary to adequately comply with current laws or engage in a costly consulting commitment to respond to the increasingly strict requirements from courts. Both options can also be damaging to brand reputation, employee productivity, and stock price.

RSD’s comprehensive information governance solution called RSD GLASS™ enables organizations to proactively manage information lifecycle while providing secure access to support eDiscovery. RSD GLASS gives organizations a powerful mechanism to policy-manage information and to align it to the correct levels of accessibility, protection, and retention. This includes structured and unstructured content stored in disparate silos (i.e. ECM repositories, SharePoint, data warehouses, databases).  Retaining records for the appropriate length of time not only helps to ensure business continuity, but also reduces storage costs associated with “keeping everything”. Strict retention management also minimizes the risk of inappropriately destroying records that could cause irreparable damage.

• Powerful mechanism to policy-manage information for proactive lifecycle management
• Retention periods are enforced according to defined policies
• Repository agnostic across multiple jurisdictions
• Search for governed content to support eDiscovery requests with automatic consolidation of results
• Disposal hold to prevent spoliation including multiple holds on a single item
• Role-based permissions with comprehensive audit trail
• Data privacy policies and controls
• Open-based architecture to integrate with third party case management systems