Companies fight urge to over preserve electronically stored data

Contributed by Charles Nguyen (Dienstag, 30 November 2010) | Category : Email litigation and compliance

Companies unsure of which email archiving compliance regulations to follow - state, federal or international - are constantly fighting the urge to retain all pieces of electronically stored information, according to a New York Law Journal report.

Varying standards and degrees of enforcement of regulatory compliance may pose a challenge for companies drafting a retention policy. But, according to the law journal, the "safe" practice is to tailor policies to fit the most demanding requirements of the toughest court ruling on the issue.

"A national corporation cannot have a different preservation policy for each federal circuit and state in which it operates," the report argues.

And while complying with the strictest court decisions may place an unwanted burden on the company, the challenges of data retention are almost always preferred to fines and sanctions.

Retaining ESI can be a tall order for any company, especially the largest organizations that produce hundreds of terabytes of information. According to the New York Law Journal report, 1 terabyte is 500 million pages of documents, 500 terabytes is 250 billion pages and 800 terabytes is 400 billion pages.