Susan Hall spoke with Albert Barsocchini, director and assistant general counsel for Guidance Software. In an article in Real eDiscovery magazine, Barsocchini makes the case for a single archiving system for e-discovery, internal investigations, audit and compliance. Hall: It seems obvious that companies should have a central system for e-discovery, compliance and internal investigations. If companies haven’t had that, how have they managed their data in the past? Barsocchini: There’s been a big gap with the fact that this stuff has been handled separately. There has been no uniform procedure and protocol for doing these things, knowing they have very similar risks and similar processes. A lot of companies have been very ad hoc in how they handle these things. But because of the judicial pressure and the other underlying compliance pressures, these companies are having to look at this stuff seriously and unify it and have a better, unified process for it. Hall: With a multinational company, the headquarters might be in another country. Does unifying these systems mean that all information has to come out of one central office, such as that headquarters? Barsocchini: Well, no. It just means you have a way to reach out and know where the various evidence resides. To attack this, a lot of companies are doing No. 1, what is called data mapping – trying to figure out where everything is, having a master map of the documents – and No. 2 having technology to go out there and grab the information, whether that’s some type of sophisticated document-management system or enterprise indexing technology to be able to go out there and grab the documents, locating those documents by doing searches across the enterprise. To Continue Reading: Click Here -------------------------------------------- Source: itbusinessedge.com By: Susan Hall

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