According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach in 2022 was $ 4.35 million. The report also found that 45% of breaches occurred in the cloud, with public cloud breaches costing the most. Thus, effective ISG makes financial sense.

Clear Vision and Action Required

The primary elements of ISG include:

• A clear vision and direction for information security communicated and supported by senior management and stakeholders.

For example, an organization can define its information security mission, vision, and values, and communicate them through a charter, a policy statement, or a code of conduct.

• A set of policies, standards, guidelines, and procedures that define the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities of information security functions and processes.

Thus, the organization establishes an information security policy framework that covers topics such as access control, data protection, and incident management.

• A mechanism to monitor, measure and report on the performance and effectiveness of information security controls and activities.
• A process to identify, assess and manage information security risks and incidents in a timely and consistent manner.

Thus, an organization should implement an incident response plan that defines the roles, procedures, and tools for handling information security incidents.

• A culture of awareness, education and training that fosters a shared understanding and commitment to information security among all employees and partners.

Organizations that conduct regular security awareness training and simulations to raise the level of security knowledge and behavior among staff and stakeholders reduce the risk and cost of a data security breach.

Protect Assets and Reputation; Increase Efficiency and Innovation

The benefits of information security governance extend beyond protecting information assets. Effective ISG enables organizations to:

• Protect information assets from unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction.

For example, effective ISG can prevent costly data breaches, cyberattacks, frauds and thefts that compromise confidential information and intellectual property.

• Enhance reputation and trust among customers, suppliers, regulators, and other stakeholders.
• Avoid lawsuits, investigations and sanctions that result from violating data protection laws, privacy regulations or contractual obligations.
• Improve operational efficiency and effectiveness by minimizing disruptions, errors, and losses.
• Achieve strategic goals and objectives by enabling innovation, collaboration, and agility.

Staff more readily leverage information assets to create new products, services or business models that enhance competitive advantage and customer satisfaction.

Information Security Governance Challenges

However, efforts to implement ISG often encounter challenges. For example, an organization may face difficulties in obtaining sufficient budget, resources, or authority for its information security initiatives if senior management does not prioritize their importance or value.

And an organization may encounter resistance or inconsistency in implementing its information security policies or controls. If different departments or teams have goals or interests not aligned or harmonized with the whole, it reduces their incentive to comply.

Additionally, some organizations may lack the necessary staff or tools to perform information security activities. If they don’t invest in recruiting, training, or outsourcing information security capabilities, they fall behind.

And organizations may face challenges in enforcing their information security rules or standards. This happens when employees or partners do not understand or appreciate the benefits or consequences.

Adopt a Holistic, Proactive, Continuous Approach

To overcome these challenges, organizations must adopt a holistic, proactive, and continuous approach to information security governance. They need to align their information security objectives with business goals and engage stakeholders in a collaborative dialogue.

Organizations must also allocate adequate resources and capabilities to their information governance and security functions.

Fostering a culture of awareness and accountability among employees and partners delivers long-term benefits. And adapting information security practices to the changing environment makes the process sustainable.

Information Security Governance Experts

Not a one-time project or a checklist item, the ISG journey requires constant vigilance, improvement, and alignment. By embracing ISG as a strategic imperative, organizations enhance their resilience, competitiveness, and success in the digital age. The eGovernance.com information security governance experts stand ready to assist.

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Consider the vast amount of sensitive data held by county governments. Without appropriate information governance, sensitive information related to local citizens and businesses could be vulnerable to breach. And when mismanaged data makes it difficult to fulfill public records requests, governments incur penalties and lose face with the public.

On the other hand, when that same county government manages, secures, and uses data effectively, they achieve critical goals of accountability, transparency and efficiency. Decision makers have reliable access to quality data, and public trust in the governing process increases. These same benefits apply to organizations in all industries.

What is eGovernance?

eGovernance refers to electronic governance, specifically governance of electronic information. As in the county government example above, common goals of eGovernance include improving data access, strengthening data security, driving efficiency and productivity and promoting accountability.

That is, organizations need to know what data they have, where it lives, who owns it and who can access it. They need to ensure that they data they own is high quality and secure from breach. And they need to achieve compliance with legislation and other regulations that govern data.

Information Governance Challenges

Today’s data environment poses significant challenges for information governance. In the first place, organizations collect massive amounts of data every day from many disparate sources. These include Teams documents, customer input from company websites, emails, meeting recordings, chat messages, data from IoT devices and much more.

Because information lives in so many different places, including BYOD devices and remote locations, identifying and securing that data proves challenging. At the same time, the regulatory environment grows more complex every year.

Technology trends such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence offer exciting capabilities. But they also complicate the cyber security environment and introduce new privacy and ethics concerns.

Finally, decision makers and data analytics tools need clean, trustworthy data. This requires comprehensive checks for duplicates, errors, and outdated information. It also requires a balance between facilitating data access and ensuring data protection and privacy.

eGovernance Solution Companies Best Practices Deliver Key Benefits

By following best practices for information governance, organizations do more than ease the path to regulatory compliance. They also reduce risk, ensure appropriate access to high quality data, and improve business planning.

An effective information governance program steps beyond checkbox compliance. For instance, in addition to ensuring the implementation of appropriate data security controls, proactive organizations will conduct penetration testing.

In addition, automating repetitive or redundant tasks such as tagging data and processing permission requests helps to reduce error. In fact, automation proves essential to managing an increasingly complex data environment.

As organizations migrate some or all their data to the cloud, they will need to adjust the tools they use to manage their data. Look for tools designed specifically to find and manage data across multiple clouds and on-premises environments.

Partner with eGovernance Solution Companies to Achieve Business Goals

An eGovernance solution company will help you choose and implement information governance solutions tailored to your business needs. The consultants at eMazzanti Technologies and Messaging Architects deliver a fully managed, cloud-based solution for preserving, discovering, and accessing digital data across your data environments.

Our data experts will begin by assisting you to build a comprehensive data and records management plan to reduce unstructured data and risk. A state-of-the-art archiving solution facilitates policy-based retention and destruction of data, regardless of Microsoft license type. Add our powerful eDiscovery tool and digital compliance solutions to gain the transparency, accountability, and efficiency your organization needs.

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For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandates that publicly traded companies indefinitely retain emails related to insider dealings. Banking laws mandate a five-year retention period. Numerous additional laws and industry regulations require various retention periods for certain types of emails.

To stay compliant, companies turn to archiving solutions. But the various solutions offer a wide range of features, and organizations must define and enforce retention policies. The process can prove complex, but these best practices will help organizations achieve compliance while supporting productive work.

Business Email Archiving vs. Backup

Archiving differs from an email backup and involves more than simply storing a copy of electronic information. Whereas a backup provides short-term insurance in case of disaster or accidental deletion, archives provide quick access to decades of important data.

Businesses archive email for several reasons. In addition to regulatory compliance, they preserve electronic data to aid in internal investigations, as well as eDIscovery for litigation and documentation of intellectual property. Archives also streamline records management by removing old data out of active mailboxes.

Because archived data must remain preserved in its original form, archiving systems operate under specific requirements. The organization must implement strict security controls and ensure that archived data is not altered in any way. Emails and attachments within the archive should be indexed to facilitate quick search and retrieval of relevant data.

Carefully Review Regulatory Requirements

Any organization could be subject to multiple federal and state laws, as well as industry regulations. Each law or regulation has its own retention requirements, and failure to comply can result in hefty penalties, reputation damage or even prison time.

To complicate matters, new privacy laws such as California’s CPRA mandate timely disposal of certain types of information. As a result, companies can no longer take the easy way out and simply keep all emails indefinitely.

Keep an eye on the regulatory landscape and consult your legal team on a regular basis to ensure ongoing compliance.

Update Retention Policies Regularly

Retention policies play a critical role in archiving. These policies indicate what data should be retained and for how long. Because business needs and regulations change periodically, organizations should review and update retention policies at least annually. In addition to the legal team, stakeholders from every department should provide input.

Embrace Automation

No matter how carefully the compliance team documents retention policies, relying on users to implement the policies manually is neither feasible nor defensible. A good archiving system will include tools to automate enforcement of retention policies. With automation, archiving and disposal happen behind the scenes, according to policy and without end user intervention.

Ensure a Tamper-proof Archive

In the event of litigation and to demonstrate compliance, the organization must be able to show a defensible chain of custody and prove that electronic data has not been edited. This requires a tamper-proof archiving system. For instance, PST files do not provide the necessary protection against corruption and should be avoided.

In addition to guarding against data corruption and editing, archiving solutions must incorporate tight security controls. This includes data encryption, both in transit and at rest. And it includes solid access management with comprehensive auditing.

Explore the Benefits of Cloud-based Business Email Archiving

Modern cloud archive solutions provide a host of business benefits. For instance, eGovernance Cloud:

• Offers dynamic data management through policy-based retention and disposal of data.
• Ensures tamper-proof archives with a read-only view into older data.
• Saves storage space by eliminating duplication.
• Allows you to retain control of your data with unlimited export functionality.
• Provides powerful search tools for both beginners and professionals, making it easy to find the data you need quickly.
• Keeps data safe with a physically separate, searchable copy. Users can forward data back to the live system as necessary.

To streamline compliance and increase productivity in your organization contact an archiving specialist to explore eGovernance Cloud archiving solutions.

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Compliance involves addressing both cyber security and data privacy. Data retention and destruction policies also play a key role. Consequently, compliance best practices involve improving data visibility through information governance and monitoring. They also include updating data policies and security practices and addressing the human component.

Use AI to Strengthen Information Governance

Because achieving compliance requires that organizations know what data they have, where it lives and who has access to it, information governance plays an important part. For instance, several privacy regulations include the “right to be forgotten.” This means that a company must be able to find and delete an individual’s personal data upon request.

Additionally, rules such as HIPAA and PCI DSS mandate the careful control of sensitive data such as protected health information (PHI) and financial data. These regulations require that organizations locate and tag all sensitive data wherever it lives or travels. With vast amounts of data on multiple platforms, finding and tagging that data represents a monumental task.

Fortunately, AI and machine learning can help. The average company manages hundreds of terabytes of data, with new data created every minute. Humans cannot feasibly find and classify all sensitive data manually. However, using pattern matching and machine learning, automated AI tools can find and classify sensitive data quickly and accurately.

Gain Visibility Through Compliance Monitoring

To identify compliance gaps, organizations should conduct regular compliance and security audits. In addition, continuous compliance monitoring allows data administrators to proactively address any potential compliance issues. Here again, automation plays a critical role.

Much of a company’s most sensitive information hides in unstructured data such as emails, PDF files and instant messages. This data can prove difficult to manage. But automated tools, powered by AI, monitor both structured and unstructured data for compliance violations.

These monitoring systems deliver automated alerts to appropriate personnel while taking precautionary action. For example, if a user attempts to improperly share PHI, the system will block the action and alert compliance officers. In addition to keeping sensitive data safe, monitoring allows the organization to demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit.

Regularly Review Data Policies

Data policies play an essential role in compliance. For instance, policies mandate who can access data and how long data should be retained. They also govern how users can share data and with whom. And they may cover certain security actions, such as the encryption of sensitive data.

An effective electronic communications policy includes not just the written policy, but also the technology to enforce that policy. For example, tools such as Microsoft 365 allow organizations to automatically prohibit sharing or destruction of sensitive data. Data policies require regular review and updates as the regulatory landscape changes and as the company adopts new tools.

Implement Essential Cyber Security Practices

Because compliance requires keeping data safe and secure from unauthorized access, data compliance best practices necessarily include security measures. At a minimum, organizations should use firewalls, keep software up to date, change default passwords and implement both multi-factor authentication and encryption.

In addition, security teams should regularly review access rights and permissions. Apply the principle of least privilege to ensure that users have the minimum amount of access they need. And make sure to remove user accounts and access when no longer needed. Tools such as Microsoft Entra help to automate access and identity management.

Provide Compliance and Security Awareness Training

Regardless of the technology involved, no compliance or security effort will prove successful if it ignores the human component. Take time to engage employees at all levels through regular privacy and security awareness training. Complement the training with phishing simulations and internal events such as privacy awareness month.

Compliance Technology Powers Data Compliance Best Practices

With a rapidly evolving regulatory environment, compliance experts suggest taking a big picture approach to achieving compliance. That is, look for privacy solutions that apply to most privacy laws, rather than applying different rules to different locations in compliance with individual states.

Technology will prove essential to a successful compliance strategy. For instance, intelligent compliance solutions from eGovernance provide insight into all indexed data through a single portal. Automatic reports alert auditors whenever an issue arises, allowing for immediate remediation. Proactive intervention saves time and money while delivering peace of mind.

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Collect Massive Amounts of Data from Disparate Sources

Civil and criminal cases frequently hinge on digital evidence, and that can mean data requests involving millions of document files. With modern collaboration methods, those documents include everything from email and voicemail to word processing files, social media and more.

In addition to including many different types of files, eDiscovery must also address numerous data environments. For instance, employees may use both company-owned and personal devices, from laptops to phones and tablets. Additionally, the organization may store data both on-premises and in multiple cloud environments and numerous applications.

Legal teams must find efficient methods to locate, collect and process that data. This involves finding a balance between collecting all relevant information and yet avoiding a data dump.

With the right tools, legal teams can locate and assess the data in place before collecting anything. An early data assessment that involves an initial in-place review of data delivers several key benefits. Legal teams can identify and address potential roadblocks early on. They also avoid over-collection of data, saving significant time and money.

Prevent Digital Spoliation of Evidence

While gathering these massive amounts of data, legal teams must take care to prevent destruction of or tampering with relevant data. This includes altering or deleting documents in any way. Whether intentional or not, this destruction of evidence, or spoliation, can result in stiff penalties and cause enormous problems.

To avoid spoliation claims, the team must use defensible methods to collect and preserve data. A critical component of this involves legal holds. Once again, early data assessment plays a key role. When the legal team identifies potentially relevant information early on, they can immediately apply legal holds to protect that data.

Technology has simplified legal holds, allowing legal teams to automate the process of creating and sending legal hold requests and releases. Reliable legal hold technology also includes auditing capabilities that ensure defensibility.

eDiscovery Challenges to Ensure Data Security

When organizations collect huge amounts of data and send it outside the organization, they effectively lose control of that data. Consider the thumb drives and other copies of data held by opposing counsel and expert witnesses. Every copy of the data distributed represents a cyber security risk.

Organizations reduce that risk by mapping and indexing the data, making it possible to conduct a preliminary review in place. Done well, this will reduce the amount of data that needs to be collected.

Taking the process a step further, the organization can collaborate with outside counsel on keywords and other search criteria. They can then gather the data set into one place and grant outside counsel conditional access to run reviews and publish for litigation. Keeping sensitive data in house ensures that the organization retains control and can audit any access.

Address eDiscovery Challenges with Unique eDiscovery Solution

Locating, collecting, and preserving data in a defensible way can prove incredibly difficult and time consuming when organizations do not have control of their data. And because of the amount of data and the time involved, eDiscovery costs typically represent from 20 to 50 percent of the costs of litigation.

Proactive organizations meet eDiscovery challenges with a strong foundation of information governance, aided by the right technology. When companies know where data resides, who owns it and who can access it, eDiscovery becomes much less painful. Legal technology such as legal holds software and automated early case assessment further streamlines the process.

eGovernance provides a comprehensive eDiscovery solution to reduce discovery overhead and improve the speed and efficiency of managing requests across disparate systems. Our unique tools allow organizations to centralize eDiscovery. Whether legal counsel reviews data in place or extracts copies for more resilient retention requirements, the data stays secure.

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Evolving Privacy Regulations

Privacy law continues to drive information governance programs, and 2023 brings regulatory changes to key states. For instance, the California Privacy Rights Act amends the existing California Consumer Protection Act and takes effect on January 1.

The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act likewise takes effect on January 1, followed by the Colorado Privacy Act on July 1 and Utah’s Consumer Privacy Act on December 31. In general, these laws apply to companies that conduct business in or offer products and services to residents of each state.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2024, privacy regulations will cover the personal data of 75 percent of the world’s population. Rather than finding and securing personal data after the fact, organizations need to implement or strengthen privacy programs proactively.

Emphasis On Data Democratization

On the other hand, while a compliance mindset emphasizes restricting access to data, 2023 also brings an increased focus on data democratization. That is, data plays a critical role in decision making at all levels. Therefore, users in a wide variety of business roles, from sales assistants to executives, need ready access to quality data.

For employees to use data effectively, they need knowledge, as well as tools and access. Thus, data strategies must include data literacy education. Users need to know how to ask the right questions about data, where to find information and how to use it responsibly.

They also need the appropriate data tools, such as data warehouses and business intelligence (BI) technology, and knowledge about how to use them. And they need appropriate data access. This will involve approaching access management in a way that delivers the right access to the right people at the right time while ensuring compliance and security.

AI and Automation Will Prove Essential

Without automation, this increasingly complex data environment would prove impossible to manage. Consequently, automation—powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—will prove increasingly essential in 2023 and beyond.

Automation plays a key role in finding and cleansing data, managing metadata, and performing other complex tasks with data. This both allows organizations to manage data at scale and empowers users to manage data on their own. It also helps to ensure regulatory compliance.

Hybrid and Multi-cloud Architecture is Here to Stay

Companies have been moving workloads to the cloud for several years. The pandemic accelerated cloud migration, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, many companies spread important data assets across multiple clouds and on premises environments.

Managing data across these various environments can prove challenging and result in data silos. This fragmentation in turn leads to complications with data access and other information governance issues. Organizations will need to invest in technologies designed to find and manage data in a hybrid environment.

Metadata Management Remains Central to Effective Information Governance

Metadata will continue to play a central role in information governance. This “data about data” serves to identify and classify information, laying the groundwork for effective data management. For instance, metadata puts data in context and enables governance policies that determine data usage and lifecycle.

As organizations focus more deliberately on using data as a business asset, metadata takes on a greater role. But with large volumes of data arriving from a wide variety of sources, organizations must leverage technology to manage metadata effectively. For instance, AI can play a significant role in automating metadata management.

Translating 2023 Information Governance Trends into Strategy

Regulatory complexities, in combination with a hybrid work environment and the need for data democratization, will make for information governance challenges in the coming year. These challenges can feel overwhelming. But they become more manageable when organizations take a step-by-step approach.

A good first step to implementing an effective information governance strategy involves a comprehensive data audit. The audit will highlight what data you have and where it lives. Our consultants can also identify potential risks and help you implement a data management strategy designed to reduce risk and support business goals.

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eGovernance Cloud Solutions

eGovernance is a Cloud based solution for preserving, discovering and accessing digital data within your email and document storage systems for compliance, audit, security, eDiscovery and warehousing of critical or older data.

Archiving »

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Compliance »

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No matter how skilled, humans alone cannot effectively track, manage, and analyze massive stores of data to achieve compliance. Fortunately, continually evolving compliance technology fills the gap.

These intelligent compliance technologies deliver key benefits by automating processes, helping companies stay updated with regulatory changes and providing continuous monitoring. Powerful risk assessment tools can also identify and prioritize potential risks early, proactively applying necessary remediation measures.

Compliance Challenges Can Prove Costly

Organizations in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, need to know where sensitive data lives and who has access to it. However, finding that data can prove difficult when it is stored across multiple platforms and storage locations. For instance, most organizations use a mix of on-premises and cloud environments, with potentially thousands of connected devices.

To successfully monitor sensitive information in this complex environment, data stewards need to classify the data. With huge amounts of data being created each day, manually locating and tagging sensitive data presents an insurmountable challenge. Organizations need a way to simplify the process and reduce the chance for human error.

Despite the challenges involved, non-compliance can result in significant consequences, including stiff fines and lost customers. Thus, compliance teams must have early notification of potential compliance issues. They also require the ability to clearly demonstrate compliance in case of an audit.

Automate Processes with AI

Because artificial intelligence (AI) can rapidly process massive amounts of data, it has become a critical component of compliance technology. AI tools save time, reduce errors, and enable early response by automating routine processes and analyzing data to highlight trends.

For instance, automating processes such as data classification and managing retention policies frees up resources and limits errors. Using pattern matching technology, AI tools can automatically recognize and tag sensitive data such as credit card information. Machine learning even allows tools to learn to identify certain types of information based on provided examples.

AI can also take the guesswork out of incorporating regulatory changes by helping organizations discover and interpret new regulations and updates. And AI tools can suggest necessary changes to policies and workflows.

Streamline Audits and Remediation

Compliance technology and AI play a key role in risk management. By automating compliance and security monitoring and analyzing patterns, advanced tools identify risks early. They then automatically send customized alerts to the right people.

For example, intelligent compliance tools deliver critical visibility into data across platforms. Once the system identifies sensitive data in unacceptable locations, it can easily remove or quarantine the information. Customizable reports demonstrate compliance and ensure that auditors and compliance officers receive the information they need daily.

eGovernance Delivers the Benefits of Compliance Technology

Tools like eGovernance provide organizations with the ability to view and manage sensitive data either manually or automatically from a single web portal. This includes streamlined data classification, automatic reports, and the ability to easily review and adjust access rights.

In addition, organizations can conduct internal investigations using powerful search capabilities. Because they can search all sources simultaneously, these digital compliance solutions allow auditors to drill down into specific compliance issues with no outsourcing.

Contact the information governance experts at eGovernance to achieve lower costs and reduced risk. They’ll help your compliance team simplify the process of achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance.

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eGovernance Cloud Solutions

eGovernance is a Cloud based solution for preserving, discovering and accessing digital data within your email and document storage systems for compliance, audit, security, eDiscovery and warehousing of critical or older data.

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1. Increasingly Complex eDiscovery Architectures

The rapid shift to remote and hybrid work drastically changed the way we collaborate and create data. For instance, in a period of months, collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom recorded growth rates of as much as 3000 percent. Now, in addition to email, colleagues conduct work over a variety of messaging apps, video conferencing and other cloud services.

At the same time, workers use numerous devices every day to conduct business, from company laptops to personal smartphones. And they use multiple applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint or Dropbox, to store and share data.

These various collaboration tools deliver massive amounts of discoverable data in a wide variety of unique formats. And this creates a need for improved technology solutions. For example, video files eat up storage space and can prove difficult and time-consuming to search. And BYOD policies complicate the process of discovery critical data across devices and platforms.

2. AI Streamlines the eDiscovery Process

Fortunately, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) can help legal teams quickly find and process relevant data. Using AI, they can analyze the body of data to develop a picture of what data exists, where it lives and how much of it may prove relevant to the case at hand.

For instance, AI can suggest related documents that more manual processes might miss. Additionally, AI-powered analytics can deliver deep insights that prioritize information and inform case strategy.

3. Automated Technology Improves Workflows and Early Case Assessment

Automating many of the routine and time-consuming tasks associated with eDiscovery frees up legal teams to focus on delivering legal advice. At the same time, automation reduces the chance for human error and leaves an audit trail. For instance, introducing automation to legal holds simplifies the process while making it scalable, secure, and legally defensible.

Automation also improves early case assessment (ECA) by helping the team quickly identify and prioritize relevant data, streamline the review process and support more accurate cost predictions. By accelerating ECA in the eDiscovery process, organizations reduce time and cost associated with gathering, preserving, and reviewing data.

Automation can improve many of the processes associated with eDiscovery. For example, organizations may find that legal holds and data collection provide a good place to start. But they should take time to develop separate workflow templates for common scenarios to avoid re-inventing the wheel with each new case.

4. Information Governance Proves Essential

While technology solutions such as automation and AI streamline eDiscovery, those solutions prove most effective when combined with information governance. In fact, information governance provides a critical foundation for eDiscovery.

In a nutshell, information governance involves knowing where the organization’s data lives and who owns it. This includes categorizing and mapping data throughout the organization, determining access controls and information lifecycles and ensuring data security. Technology powers all these processes.

With data properly classified and mapped, a process enhanced by automation, teams can use in-place searches to quickly find and analyze relevant data before gathering it. In addition, good retention/destruction policies help ensure clean data and reduce redundancies, making eDiscovery easier.

5. Cloud-Based Technology Drives Efficiency and Lowers Cost

Most organizations, including law firms, store some or all their workloads and data in the cloud. Consequently, relying on legacy, on-premises eDiscovery solutions will no longer prove a viable option moving forward. Cloud-based technologies make it easier to find and collect relevant data while reducing discovery overhead and improving speed and efficiency. They can include legacy on-premises data as well as data from multiple cloud solution vendors.

Proactively Address eDiscovery Trends with Legal Technology

By leveraging current and emerging legal technology, organizations can overcome eDiscovery trends and challenges such as multiple data formats and the need to locate and process massive amount of data quickly. Cloud-based information governance and eDiscovery solutions from eGovernance.com help companies gain control of their data and reduce eDiscovery pain.

eGovernance solutions work across multiple platforms, centralizing eDiscovery while allowing you to keep your data in place. Additionally, teams can extract copies as needed to meet retention requirements. Streamlining eDiscovery with eGovernance.com solutions reduces the time and cost involved while improving security and ensuring a legally defensible process.

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Address the Risks of Unstructured Data

The bulk of the information generated by the average organization consists of unstructured data. Unlike structured data, which lives in tables or databases, unstructured data comes in a wide variety for formats.

For instance, it includes documents stored in file repositories such as SharePoint or OneDrive. It also includes emails, instant messages, videos and more. And because this unstructured data can live on multiple devices and in the cloud, it presents a significant challenge to security and regulatory compliance.

Consider healthcare organizations that must maintain strict adherence to HIPAA. Patients may email their care providers. Additionally, providers dictate notes from patient encounters, and doctors communicate in various methods as they collaborate to provide care. Strict regulations govern how that data is stored, transferred, and shared.

Reduce Risk of Privacy Law Violations

Data compliance monitoring helps organizations address potential privacy law violations early, reducing or eliminating legal issues. With the right tools, companies gain visibility into all data storage locations, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Using both automated and manual data classification, organizations tag sensitive data such as financial data or protected health information (PHI). They then set customized alerts so that compliance personnel receive immediate email notification of possible compliance issues. Companies can also automate certain remediation actions.

For instance, in the healthcare organization mentioned above, the system can be set to automatically tag PHI as sensitive data. If a user attempts to share PHI outside the organization, the system can be set to block the action and immediately alert compliance personnel.

Demonstrate Regulatory Compliance

Privacy regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA and GDPR dominate our data environment. Organizations must be able to demonstrate to auditors that they take all the proper steps to ensure that no unauthorized persons can access sensitive information. Additionally, customers demand assurance that companies treat their personal and financial information carefully.

Many regulatory agencies mandate monitoring as part of the criteria for achieving compliance. Monitoring demonstrates that the organization has implemented proper procedures and regularly enforces them. Additionally, if an issue does slip through, monitoring can help in reducing the negative repercussions.

Identify Security Vulnerabilities

In addition to achieving and demonstrating compliance, monitoring provides essential visibility into how data moves within and outside the organization. This allows security personnel and data stewards to pinpoint vulnerabilities and adjust information governance strategies accordingly.

Harness the Power of Automated Data Compliance Monitoring

Organizations manage huge caches of data in numerous formats on hundreds of devices. Such a complex data environment makes manual monitoring all but impossible. Fortunately, advancements in automated monitoring technology can help.

Not only can automation process large amounts of data rapidly, but with AI and machine learning the systems learn to identify risks and alert the right people. In many cases, the monitoring systems can automatically initiate necessary remediation, such as blocking a user from sharing sensitive data.

Automation also helps companies stay on top of the regulatory landscape. Laws and industry regulations continue to evolve, and it can prove challenging for organizations to keep abreast of all the applicable standards. Automated monitoring systems can scan for regulatory changes.

Partner with Data Compliance Monitoring Technology Experts

eGovernance solutions provide organizations with the tools they need to monitor data for compliance with regulations and with internal policies. Compliance personnel can track sensitive data and initiate steps to reduce or eliminate potential threats.

Along with compliance monitoring, customers gain access to consultants with deep expertise in information governance, archiving and eDiscovery.

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As organizations moved their email operations to responsive and accessible cloud services such as Microsoft 365, legacy archiving solutions quickly lost ground to more up-to-date technology. Thus, rather than limp along with an outdated and poorly supported product, forward-looking business leaders choose to migrate to a modern cloud archiving solution.

Why organizations look to migrate:    

• Existing on-premise solutions require continuous licensing and physical upgrades of services and software
• Courted by legacy archive solution vendors to move to their cloud solutions
• They see platforms like Microsoft 365 as being a more economical solution for storage and consolidated eDiscovery services. (Organizations should seek to understand the limitations and potential costs for storing and managing legacy data in Microsoft 365)
• Consolidation of discovery services

Migrate All or Part?

Organizations with legacy archive systems may find that they no longer provide the functionality required by users. At the same time, regulatory compliance demands email retention, forcing them to examine and address the data in their legacy system.

Some consider migrating the total email archive to a cloud archiving solution. This option helps to ensure regulatory compliance. And the opportunity for virtually unlimited cloud storage makes it possible. However, moving the entire archive to the cloud solution may not be practical or feasible.

A second option includes consolidating data from the legacy archive to XML. Done correctly, the process results in a fully indexed archive that allows for eDiscovery. This option achieves compliance and saves time but makes archived data less accessible from active mailboxes. Hence, the preferred solution likely combines cloud migration with the creation of a partial XML repository.

Retain Control of Data

Some legacy archive vendors may persuade organizations to transfer data into their new SaaS cloud solution. Avoiding the support and infrastructure costs associated with the on-premises system provides the incentive. However, many of these solutions exact punitive charges for trying to extract your data or they enforce unyielding restrictions.

For example, on-premise archive systems typically integrate with third-party vendors for extraction of data. However, once the data is moved to that vendor’s cloud solution, those integrations quickly become unavailable.

Furthermore, vendors jealously guard and restrict access to the data, locking a lot of customers into a long-term relationship. Thereafter, it requires substantial capital to export data into the formats required for further processing.

While the data in your legacy system remains on site, you retain ultimate control over it. Thus, once moved to the cloud, you must ensure that you avoid the trap of giving up control as you transfer management and storage of the data.

Plan for Legacy Email Archive to Cloud Migration Success

Obstacles to a successful legacy email archive to cloud migration include massive data files, maintaining stub to message links, and chain of custody compliance issues. Despite the challenges, a combination of careful planning and the right tools lead to successful legacy archive migrations.

Start with a system review. Gather stakeholders with knowledge of the business requirements and the regulatory issues. With that team, assess the amount of data stored, the age of the data and the categories of information found within.

Then, before starting the actual migration, carefully outline the plan of attack. For instance, what data will you move to the new system, and what will you leave behind? Migrations present an excellent opportunity to update email retention policies and clean up bloated data files.

In addition, be sure to consider the implications of the migration. That means taking the time to review changes in functionality from user access and eDiscovery perspectives. Likewise, carefully examine the pending changes affecting data ownership and control.

Legacy Email Archive to Cloud Migration Experts

Partnering with email migration experts helps to ensure the success of the legacy email archive to cloud migration project. The migration experts at eGovernance understand not only the challenges of migrating data from legacy email archiving solutions but also the advantages and disadvantages to moving it to some cloud systems.

Through hundreds of legacy migrations and years of working with clients of all sizes, they have streamlined the legacy migration process. They help determine how much data to migrate and provide the tools to reconcile stubs with archived emails. They also ensure that the chain of custody necessary for full regulatory compliance is maintained.

Whether you use MXLogic, GWAVA Retain, HP Autonomy or another legacy system, eGovernance and the migration experts at eMazzanti Technologies take the frustration out of legacy migrations, leaving you free to address your core business needs. They know the roadblocks, and possess the tools and expertise to overcome them, ensuring a smooth migration to a modern cloud archive solution.

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