A new survey conducted by Osterman Research for email archiving provider Fortiva, revealed that email discovery requests are putting a important strain on IT resources. The survey shows that IT departments face an average of 22 litigation-related requests annually; for organizations with over 1000 employees that number jumps to 37 litigation-related requests each year. Even more the survey states that IT departments receive an average of 37 business requests, 25 regulatory or audit-related requests, and 107 end-user requests annually.

    Eric Goodwin, CEO, Fortiva, stated: “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. 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.”

    In addition, Michael Osterman, Osterman Research, stated: “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. 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.”

    The survey showed that retrieving raw email information 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.

Among the other things discovered are:

    * For each discovery request, over half of the time spent by IT (58 percent) is spent gathering, restoring and searching through backups, while the remainder is spent finding and searching through PST files (25 percent) and searching through the email server (17 percent).
    * In addition to being time-consuming, discovery requests are having a negative impact on other projects. One in four businesses surveyed has delayed a business or IT initiative in order to meet legal discovery requirements.
    * IT departments bear the bulk of the costs of recovering data for legal discovery, representing an average of 62 percent of the total costs involved.
    * On average, businesses keep 24 months’ worth of data on backup tapes.

For more information visit http://www.fortiva.com/ .