Governor Schwarzenegger Signs California’s Electronic Discovery Act

A version of the 2006 FRCP amendments regarding electronically stored information (ESI) has made its way to California. While Governor Schwarzenegger previously vetoed another version of California's Electronic Discovery Act for budgetary reasons, last night it appeared that even the state's budget woes were no match for the power of ESI in the courts. The Governor signed the new Act yesterday and it is effective immediately. According to the Act:

The Civil Discovery Act requires any documents produced in response to an inspection demand to be produced as they are kept in the usual course of business, or be organized and labeled to correspond with the categories in the demand. The documents are to be produced on the date described above or as agreed by the parties pursuant to an extension.

To view the Electronic Discovery Act in its entirety, click here. The bottom line is that in this day and age, e-discovery requests in court cases are commonplace. Quite frequently, the "smoking gun" evidence in many corporate cases is found in electronically stored records like emails. Now more than ever, organizations of all sizes need to be prepared to process and produce electronic records in a short amount of time. The message is clear - the federal courts and an increasing number of state courts expect electronic records to be just as accessible and producible as their hard copy ancestors.

So, have you heard the one about the lawyer and the "missing" emails? Me either, but I'm guessing it's coming ...

Are You Risking Compliance in an “Unsecure” Cloud?

Two of the biggest concerns about cloud services are data control and security. While these are both very valid concerns, the security fear is also unsubstantiated (some vendors do have questionable practices about data ownership, but LiveOffice believes that every KB to TB of data belongs to its clients, and they can get it back whenever they want). Software-as-a-service (SaaS), or cloud, providers actually have some of the most advanced equipment and technologies on the market - much more high-end systems and safeguards than the majority of companies can afford on premise. After all, this is their livelihood. If they aren't experts at securing the data they store, they won't be around for very long.

Compliance goes hand in hand with these issues, but data stored on a vendor's servers is vulnerable to the same threats as data stored on your own servers. The important thing to note is that the best service providers are well equipped to deal with these challenges and minimize risk. Ultimately, they can do it more effectively than you can.

While there will always be naysayers, some feel that security is best left to the cloud. "SaaS is tailor made for keeping up with the rapid pace of malware development," says Cody Leser, senior director of channel sales at Trend Micro. "There's no way to push patch files continuously; you have to do it in the cloud."

Todd Fitzwater, principal at Demand Solutions Group, says, "Your data is actually getting taken care of in [service providers'] data center[s] better than in yours. The backup and recovery, disaster recovery and security around the servers is much tighter and higher grade than you would put in your own data center."

As with any major decision, companies need to do their due diligence and ask questions - lots of them. Where is the data being stored? What security measures are in place at each data center? Are the data centers redundant? Are the data centers monitored 24-7-365? What type of encryption is being used to protect data in transit? What type of infrastructure is being used to host the data? What type of spam-and-virus protection is in place? Can the data centers handle a sudden increase in demand? How often is data backed up and where are backups stored? Does the service provider enlist an independent, third-party vendor to conduct periodic security scans and other checks? What happens in the event of downtime or a disaster? What happens if the company decides to move its data elsewhere? What happens if the service provider goes out of business or sells to another company?

In the end, you need to make sure you are comfortable with the answers you receive. If there is any doubt about the security of your data, it's probably time to talk to another service provider.

The Intelligence Behind Email Patterns

Researchers recently discovered some astonishing corporate email patterns when sifting through Enron's publically available email database. While they expected to see elevated chatter during moments of crisis, they found that email volumes picked up significantly more than a month before the company's downfall was common knowledge.

They also noticed that, as stress builds within a company, employees start talking directly to the individuals that they feel most comfortable with, which means they stop sharing information widely. Rather than hammering out long email threads with multiple recipients, this research shows that employee correspondence quickly becomes one-on-one emails to their most trusted colleagues. That is, in the midst of a pending crisis - these individuals form "cyber cliques" via corporate email.

Why is this important? The study suggests that email patterns can serve as an early warning sign of growing discontent within an organization. According to Ronaldo Menezes, one of the study's researchers, "Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful."

This research only starts to hint at the value of having an email archive. By storing all of your email in a central, searchable repository, you can unearth important trends - sometimes without even looking at the contents of the email.

• Managers can monitor email communications with key clients to ensure proper follow-up and make sure that your customers are being treated appropriately
• Sales managers don't have to miss a beat if one of their sales representatives leaves since their email history can be quickly transferred to another rep
• Human resources can ensure that employees are using email appropriately (i.e., devoid of profanity or sexual innuendo) and address potential problem employees proactively (there's something to be said for ye ole sentinel effect)

Curiously, none of these are usually cited as reasons for adopting an email archiving solution. But given time, perhaps they will. I think part of the problem here is that the term "email archive" is a bit of a misnomer as it connotes an impenetrable vault (i.e. a place where emails go to die). But in actuality, email archives are active repositories where messages can be easily searched and retrieved on-demand. In today's information-centric world, email archiving goes way beyond just storing emails and meeting regulatory requirements - it's an organization-wide tool for increasing efficiency.

Email archives can unlock valuable company information and expose trends. This information, in turn, can fuel better customer service, improve the use of email as a professional communication tool and perhaps even foreshadow a coming crisis.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em … VARs Consider Benefits of SaaS

Whether you're drinking the Kool-Aid or shrugging off software-as-a-service (SaaS) as the latest fad, it doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon. In fact, according to an estimate from the leading industry analyst firm Gartner, SaaS (also known as cloud computing) will jump from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013.

As more and more companies begin to adopt SaaS, value-added resellers (VARs) must also consider the switch. But the decision is a little more challenging for VARs. First, SaaS requires VARs to completely change their business models, which is no easy feat. Some VARs also feel that SaaS threatens control of their customer relationships. And finally, the SaaS model takes longer to realize profitability, taking VARs from low-volume, high-margin products and services to high-volume, lower-margin sales.

On the upside, however, the quality of earnings with the SaaS model is higher with more predictable, recurring revenues. In addition, although the types of professional services VARs offer may also require some changes with SaaS, there is still a great deal of opportunity to provide value. Data conversions, project management, change management, training, system integration and software customization are still high-demand needs that offer tremendous business value. It's also important to recognize that VARs have a big opportunity to add value to up-and-coming hybrid approaches, for example, LiveOffice's partnership with Mimosa and Microsoft's software-plus-services model.

In the end, VARs need to be flexible and provide solutions their customers want and need. SaaS is a big player, especially in a down economy, and it's getting easier to sell as more and more customers begin to understand it and adopt it. So take notice, VARs, and decide where you see the future of your business. But as Francis Bacon said of innovation, "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator."

Tweeting Financial Advisors? FINRA Rules Apply.

Anyone who was around the financial services industry in the early 2000's when registered reps and brokers started using email for business remembers the great debate - "What will FINRA say about email?" Today, there's a new question - "What will FINRA say about Twitter?"

Leave it to great tech writer Davis Janowski (@ddjanowski)of InvestmentNews to clear up FINRA's take on tweeting. According to his recent article, "FINRA doesn't believe it's appropriate to make special rules for each new communication tool that becomes available."

"We are very interested in accommodating new technology, but the challenge is to have rules that are both specific enough to address current issues, but broad enough to accommodate evolving technologies and future developments," said Thomas Pappas, FINRA's vice president and director of the advertising regulation department in Rockville, Md. "If we were to write a rule that addresses something too specific, say Western Union telegrams, it wouldn't have taken long before that rule was deemed obsolete," he said.

That means, in order for reps to keep their tweets on the up-and-up, they'd have to be archived and potentially pre-screened (just like websites and emails), which as one of the story sources observes -basically removes the spontaneous nature of social media (i.e. the whole point) from the equation.

Like I said, great article that answers a question many of us in the industry are asking. Certainly there is no question that new technologies pose compliance risks. Here's my take - we weren't sure how we were going to deal with websites back in the mid-90s, we also weren't sure what would happen with email and IM in the early 2000s, but we figured it out (necessity is the mother of invention, right?). Now another communication method is out there - and it's up to tech vendors like us to figure out what we need to develop in order to make Twitter another tool in the quiver of financial services professionals (and all organizations, for that matter).

Game on.

Testing out Twitter? Follow me at @adugdale (recommended if you like celebrity gossip mixed w/ tech observations) or follow our company @liveoffice (recommended if you're interested in finding out what's going on at our org).

*Edit

Check this out: Great blog post on Twitter and Compliance from Doug Cornelius (blogger & CCO at Beacon Capital).

Abracadabra – Emails Begone!

We've come to the point in which it's no longer a surprise when emails just magically vanish from their respective environment. As reported by The News & Observer here, this has happened yet again as James Oblinger, the former chancellor of N.C. State University, had lost six months of high-priority correspondence. These emails have recently become relevant to litigation pertaining to how Oblinger allegedly helped to create a job for First Lady Mary Easley that involved an 88 percent pay increase in one year.

John Woodward, the university's interim chancellor, takes the stance that the university's retention policy calls for the emails to be deleted and that the data wasn't manually removed. N.C. State is now bringing in forensic technicians to determine whether or not any of the data can be recovered.

I'd say that this is all the more reason to have an archiving solution in place while maintaining appropriate retention policies. Granted, if you're in a regulated industry you're generally only required to keep your email for a certain length of time. But would it really hurt to cover all of your bases by keeping it longer? If you've got nothing to hide, you're only protecting yourself and potentially eliminating concerns stressed by potential accusers.

After all, wasn't it just a week ago that I blogged about a similar topic? Raise your hand if you're beginning to tire of emails that vanish faster than David Copperfield. At least in this case, Oblinger didn't opt for the Tyrell S. Drew hand drill method.

The New Deal: Proactive Email Archiving

It used to be that email archiving was relegated to just financial services companies which were required to archive their email due to regulatory compliance requirements.

But, increasingly, companies of all stripes are discovering its other advantages.

As our inboxes get clogged and our email servers bloat, many organizations are turning to archiving to ‘prune' their on-premise email stores and regain their system's performance. Email archiving solutions solve these storage management headaches by offloading email storage to the cloud or to an on-premise solution.

But, increased email volumes have also resulted in the courts shining a brighter spotlight on email communications. The growing cost of e-discovery, compounded by new regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), has changed the way businesses must deal with email. When email becomes evidence, the ability to quickly search all historical email provides a competitive advantage.

In a recent article on SearchStorage.com ("Email archiving needs soar as e-discovery requests rise"), organizations are deploying email archiving solutions just to be proactive. Miami Country Day School, for instance, has no pending lawsuits and no pressing need for e-discovery capabilities. "But, Donna Lenaghan, the private school's director of technology, said she wanted to be proactive as soon as she learned of the legal requirements through an education technology journal."

Miami Country Day School still hasn't had occasion to use e-discovery capabilities for legal discovery, but they are still getting value out of the archive by providing end users access to their own personal archives. Now, their end users have the tools at their finger tips for locating and restoring inadvertently deleted emails. In the past, ferreting them from backup disks might have taken a day or more.

"It's a very handy day-to-day operation tool," said Lenaghan. "But it's also a peace-of-mind insurance policy if you have a legal issue."

And for organizations who go the hosted email archiving route (vs. opting for an on-premise solution), they can get up and running in hours - not weeks or months. In fact, Lenaghan didn't even consider an in-house email archiving product, because the school's four-person IT staff already has a full plate, with 1,000 students and staff members.

For many resource-strapped IT departments, like Miami Country Day School, the incremental benefits of getting relief from spiraling email storage costs, being able to quickly respond to e-discovery requests, and allowing end-users to restore lost or deleted emails is the icing on the cake. And it's this "icing" that is increasingly putting email archiving at the top of their priority lists.

Hybrids: On-premise and Cloud-based Email Archiving with Mimosa

As some folks know, I previously spent several years in the on-premise email archiving industry.  And while I'm now an unabashed fanboy of cloud-based technologies, I've been in both worlds long enough to realize that each model has its trade offs.

On-premise archives provide a number of unique benefits including:

• Tight integration with internal systems
• Complete control for IT
• Archiving of other internal content sources beyond email (e.g., file servers)

In contrast, cloud-based email archiving offers:

• Limitless storage and indexing leveraging the economies of scale of the cloud
• Flat, predictable pricing
• Secure, external access for reviewers

Many customers gravitate fully to one camp or the other.  But we are seeing an increasing number of clients interested in achieving the best of both worlds to address a couple of key challenges:

• Managing cost to store an ever growing volume of email driven by longer and longer retention periods
• Automating export and review of responsive content to parties outside of the company 

To this end, today we announced the BETA availability of LiveOffice CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint, an integration with our friends at leading email archiving vendor Mimosa Systems.

CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint automatically pushes some or all of the data from the on-premise NearPoint email archive to LiveOffice's secure cloud-based archive on a regular basis.

This integration, detailed here, gives customers two key benefits.

Benefit 1: Tiered Storage to the Cloud

Older email messages can be aged off of the on-premise archive and stored securely in LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive.  In this way, the cost and size of the on-premise archive storage can be capped while maintaining easy access to your content, thereby:

• Providing an alternative to new on-premise storage purchases
  
• Automating migration of data between storage platforms as data ages in the archive
  
• Leveraging the unlimited storage pricing model of LiveOffice's archive

Benefit 2: Secure, Open Review through the Cloud

A subset of records can be transferred securely from the on-premise archive to LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive.  This eliminates the need for manual exports and shipments from the on-premise archive and allows outside counsel, legal partners or any outside reviewer to search and iterate on a subset of the data in the archive.

For example, imagine that I receive an e-discovery request from outside counsel. Without this solution, I would have to spend time manual exporting the initial data set and copying it to a DVD before shipping it to the requestor. There would likely be subsequent requests to modify the search criteria so I'd have to repeat the export and shipping process again and again. But CloudMerge changes that process entirely. Now, I'm able to seamlessly move each desired data set from the NearPoint archive to the LiveOffice archive on-demand. The requestor is provided with a login and password and is able to access the data set almost instantly (without ever gaining access to my network) and perform their own customized searches.  

For more, please check out this page.

Huge thanks to our partners at Mimosa Systems for their collaboration on this venture.

Network Admins Plugin to Email Archiving

Our team has always believed that the masses should have access to the many  benefits that email archiving offers, from streamlining mailbox management to enhancing end user productivity. Today, we're making good on this belief by launching the first-ever email archiving plugin on the Spiceworks platform.

Over the last few months, our engineers have been working to build a plugin (some call it a widget) that can be easily downloaded and instantly deployed by Spiceworks's community of more than 700,000 IT professionals. This development is significant in the email archiving space, here's why:

• We've boiled down the email archiving deployment process to a five-click installation - bear in mind that traditional on-site deployment often takes weeks and/or months
  
• We've streamlined the journaling process - you can get up and running in minutes with no intervention from our sales team
  
• We're providing Spiceworks users with 5 free archiving accounts (unlimited storage) - we stand behind the benefits of email archiving and want folks to experience them first-hand without making any kind of commitment

In order to get the plugin, you:

• Download the Spiceworks IT Desktop
• Install the plugin from the plugin section of the Spiceworks Community

After journaling has been configured, a pie chart (like the one above) displays the number of emails archived per user as well as some helpful stats about email storage.  We encourage you to plugin to our email archiving and let us know what you think!

WANTED: Intern W/ Handyman Exp – Must Love Email and Power Tools

A couple of summers ago, that could have been the advertisement posted by the Democratic Department of Information Technology in Mount Holly, part of Dauphin County, for an available internship position. 

While many of us talk about our coffee-getting and other entry-level adventures as interns - one took his position as something entirely different. As recent documents reveal, House intern Tyrell S. Drew spent his days erasing computer hard drives and destroying email backup tapes that would later become relevant to the attorney general's investigation into the legislative payroll scandal.

The tools of Drew's trade included a hand drill and a large magnet - both of which are devastating to the delicate nature of a hard drive's internal components. Is it fair to fault an intern for such actions? After all, he was presumably nothing more than an unassuming community college student in search of work experience - and he was only acting on orders from his superiors. It's quite possible that he didn't realize what he was doing was wrong.

But as the regularly-appearing headlines tell us, entire cases now hinge on the admissibility of electronic records (like emails and attachments). These headlines also serve as daily reminders that our government bodies aren't immune to the trials and tribulations brought about by the never-ending influx of data.

This just goes to show you that all organizations need to have some sort of system in place for preserving electronic records.