Index Engines Addresses Electronic Discovery Challenges Posed By December 1st Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure

Enterprise Strategy Group Whitepaper Reports 91 Percent of Large Enterprises Experienced eDiscovery Event in 2006; Index Engines Reduces Cost of Discovery Process Through Automated Indexing of Offline Tape Content

HOLMDEL, NJ – November 21, 2006 - Studies from leading industry analysts at Enterprise Strategy Group reveal that traditional discovery processes involving corporate counsel and external attorneys is becoming increasingly complicated as attorneys need to rely on IT departments to search desktops, servers, backup tapes, e-mail applications and other data center systems. Findings from a recent white paper by the Enterprise Strategy Group show that 91 percent of organizations with a workforce over 20,000 employees have been through an electronic discovery event involving e-mail in the past twelve months, and that regardless of revenue or number of employees, 46 percent have been through an electronic discovery event over the same time period.

In order to identify digital information as part of a legal discovery request companies must review enormous amounts of enterprise data located on file systems and applications on primary data storage systems, backup tapes and tape archives. Recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) underline the increasing amount of legal requests involving digitally stored information. To comply with these new requirements, organizations will need to review their discovery processes to depend more on information technology to uncover relevant email, files and other data.

According to Enterprise Strategy Group, 56 percent of the enterprises responding to a recent survey have found that retrieving data from offline media such as backup tape to be a significant challenge when producing electronic records while 50 percent found that lack of effective software tools to search and retrieve information was a significant challenge. Additionally, research data reveals that organizations misunderstand the role of electronic discovery in their organization. For example, many organizations believe that electronic discovery is only a requirement of the financial services industry, when in fact, the percentage of non-financial firms that have experienced an electronic data discovery request over the past twelve months include the following:

• Telecom, 63 percent
• Government, 62 percent
• Energy, 50 percent
• Health Care / Life Sciences, 42 percent
• Manufacturing, 40 percent
• Education, 38 percent

According to Brian Babineau, analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, “Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) will keep electronic discovery at the forefront of general counsel and IT department’s minds and budgets for the foreseeable future. In fact, these amendments should serve as a catalyst for many executives, including general counsel, to sponsor IT initiatives that can facilitate the identification and location of all enterprise data.”

Solutions for Electronic Discovery

Technology vendors are delivering enterprise indexing solutions that streamline the discovery, classification and management of data across the enterprise. Enterprise indexing leader, Index Engines, provides the only technology that understands storage protocols, enabling the efficient collection of data at wire speed from primary storage, servers, backup tape and archives. The company’s recently announced TE-200 Tape Engine eliminates the cost and complexity of indexing offline tapes by integrating into existing tape backup infrastructures and directly indexing offline tapes. With costs reaching an estimated $2,000 to $3,000 per backup tape, according to ESG, many companies are spending millions of dollars paying service providers to restore data from offline storage media since that is where large capacities of historical data are retained. Index Engines, on the other hand, offers the only electronic discovery solution capable of retrieving data directly from tape, eliminating the need to restore data to disk in order to begin searching. The TE-200 allows searching of the index and can issue queries for full content search using Boolean operators, document metadata (title, author, date modified, date accessed, file type, size, and more), or email metadata.

For organizations interested in obtaining a white paper on the topic of electronic discovery, Enterprise Strategy Group’s newly released report entitled Leveraging IT and Electronic Discovery Technology to Meet the Expected Challenges Posed by Recent Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure can be downloaded for free.