The current path of email archiving and retention systems is not sustainable. Forced to plug 'smoking gun' email holes, organizations are realizing that storage and discovery costs are escalating beyond control, systems are hard to scale, performance is a constant challenge, and "archive everything" approaches bring unnecessary risks.
For example, studies indicate that only 5-10% of an organization's stored content must be retained for legal and compliance reasons, leaving a massive amount of corporate data that is either unnecessary or can be potentially twisted to re-write history and attack a company in a legal sense.
Based on feedback from the LegalTech event, the vendor community is keenly aware that customers are frustrated. Comparisons with ERP and CRM were heard from clients, and vendors are beginning to craft responses. Users however must maintain a healthy skepticism when evaluating roadmaps and be open to new approaches and emerging technologies (e.g. see Digital Reef and Rational Retention). While these and other startups are immature, they appear to be directly attacking tough problems such as auto-classification and distributed risk management. As well, they are not hampered by legacy baggage.
Action Item: Organizations must begin architecting next-generation archiving and retention solutions focused on managing risk at the point where content resides (distributed risk management). Set management expectations that existing highly centralized systems and processes are inadequate and need to accommodate the new mobile workforce reality.
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