Proofpoint Predicts Top 10 eDiscovery Trends In 2011

Proofpoint, a provider of Cloud-enabled email security, compliance and eDiscovery solutions, has recently announced the forecast for the top 10 eDiscovery trends for the year 2011.

Proofpoint (News - Alert) is a Software as a Service (SaaS) security and compliance vendor for large enterprises, universities and government organizations. Email archiving and eDiscovery has become very popular, especially in the financial circles.

Proofpoint has presented the 10 best eDiscovery trends for the year 2011, based on the company’s close work with customers and legal professionals in email archiving and eDiscovery.

The most popular trend would be eDiscovery In-Sourcing focus to shifts to Legal Risk Management as organizations would deploy eDiscovery in-house mainly to fulfil the objective of legal cost reduction. However, customers would find that the quick trade off of reduced eDiscovery cost against the potential increase in legal risk exposure would provide additional legal risk.

The second popular trend would include acceleration in the adoption of cloud based eDiscovery, in order to reduce cost and technological complexity associated with aging in-house systems, in the place of further hardware and infrastructure upgrades. Also, organizations will now have increased requirements and will expect explicit Service Level Agreements (SLA) which will include the frequency of data access, performance guarantees, security infrastructure, data ownership, chain of custody protection, and the ability to adhere to applicable privacy laws in states or nations where information is located.

Security, Privacy, and Discovery will become a compulsory part of the Governance strategies such as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. There will be marked improved efficiency of multinational eDisclosure or eDiscovery rules and frameworks, which stems from both the EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party and Sedona Conference Working Group.

There will be an increased need for closer integration between eDiscovery workflows and data sources, as well as continuation of the EDRM XML adoption. Increased emphasis will be placed on archiving capabilities based on continuing growth of the social media content within financial services.

Significant increase in file archiving will be supported by growth of file shares and SharePoint by quickly crawling and identifying the relevant content on demand. Organizations will come to expect fast and sustainable access to the information, which will form the common purchase driver in deployment of Archiving and eDiscovery.

And the final trend to make it to the top ten lists will include retention policy management, with "Start Small with Big Buckets" as a Best Practice especially for IT, legal, and records management stakeholders.

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