Enterprise Discovery Management and Value-Based Information Management with the Atlas Information Governance Suite

Enterprise Challenges

Global enterprises face a tremendous challenge to meet growing legal and judicial expectations for preservation and retention. The volume of data is increasing by 50% per year¹ making the legal burden greater than ever and increasing data management and discovery costs.

The Legal Department has hundreds to thousands of matters, each with gigabytes per custodian. Thousands of disparate, country-specific laws governing data privacy and retention add complexity and risk. Enterprises resort to "save everything" practices — exacerbating discovery and data management costs without truly reducing legal risk.

The IT Department manages thousands of constantly changing servers and continuous employee departures. Without reliable and routine guidance on what data to manage under which protocol, IT ends up managing data with no business value; data management and information discovery costs escalate.

Lines of Business often have little visibility into legal obligations and impending legal costs. Litigation, finance and business executives often rely on inaccurate or unreliable forecasts for discovery costs that take weeks to prepare but provide a poor basis for budgeting or decision making.

Atlas Information Governance Suite

Atlas unifies Legal, IT, Records Management, Finance and Lines of Business to eliminate unnecessary discovery and data management risk and cost. The Suite includes enterprise workflow decision support tools and a unified inventory of assets and their legal obligations and business value. Atlas enables your company to meet its duties for legal information governance and to identify and elminate data with no business value or legal obligation.

With Atlas, The Legal Department can quickly and precisely scope information and custodians in legal matters to intelligently constrain cost on the front end of the process. Legal can publish holds more effectively to employees, IT and RIM as well as directly to systems. Facts uncovered about custodian data in online interviews inform custodian-specific collection instructions and flow straight through to IT. Atlas automatically forecasts discovery costs as soon as the hold is scoped so budgets can be set and counsel can negotiate fully informed.

The IT Department can easily coordinate, delegate and complete discovery work without redundant record keeping and uninventoried copies of collected data. IT can routinely dispose of data without value, and defensibly dispose of legacy data. IT monitors which systems present the greatest risk and applies its resources accordingly.

The Records and Information Management Organization can quickly launch and sustain a global, value-based retention program that goes well beyond physical records to establish retention schedules for all information that reflect the specific business value, regulatory and privacy requirements of diverse business units and coutry operations and is appropriate for diverse business and country operations.

¹20% growth in annual e-discovery spend, IDC