Email Archive for Legal Users: eDiscovery Cost and Risk Reduction
In order to be prepared for legal discovery and investigative events, organizations must know where all their email data is stored and be able to search through and retrieve that email data in a short period of time. Without a reliable email archiving solution, organizations have historically resorted to recovery of email data from unmanaged data sources such as back-up tapes, PST files, and imaged hard drives to address the early stages of legal ediscovery and internal investigations. Companies are now in search of alternatives to these methods of identification, collection, and preservation that have proven to be too expensive, disruptive, and inexact.
In serving as a proxy for the actual mail system, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive can be utilized as the primary source for email within legal ediscovery and investigative exercises. Capturing all email communications in a searchable repository in an unalterable, de-duplicated form provides ongoing discovery readiness.
Email Archive for Legal Users Key Capabilities:
- Easily Enforce Email Retention Policies: Proofpoint Enterprise Archive's policy engine allows an organization to create, maintain and—most importantly—consistently enforce a clear corporate retention policy for email. Enforcement of email retention policies is automatic—a single click from the user interface is all that's needed to make a policy active. Every email retention policy change is tracked in an unalterable audit trail, ensuring an accurate record of an organization's email retention policy changes.
- Automated Legal Hold Management: With Proofpoint Enterprise Archive, the litigation hold process is simple and complete. The eDiscovery email solution allows an organization to define a litigation hold for each matter, which exempts email messages from their assigned retention period for the duration of that matter. Proofpoint's Active Legal Hold capability preserves existing email and can also capture new email that is relevant to ongoing legal holds or investigations.
- Forensically Compliant Storage Infrastructure: To ensure data meets the highest evidentiary standards, Proofpoint guarantees that records cannot be deleted or altered once they have been archived. Proofpoint ensures the authenticity and accessibility of all archived data by storing multiple copies of messages and indexes, digitally fingerprinting all messages and attachments, and maintaining a full audit trail of user activities and systems. The operations of Proofpoint Enterprise Archive follow strict procedural controls that are clearly documented, and undergoes annual audits by an accredited firm to ensure that the documented procedures are followed.
- Unsurpassed Data Security and Privacy Protection: Proofpoint provides the most secure email archive in the industry by providing a number of assurances that protect the privacy and security of information, both while in transit and at rest. This includes Proofpoint's patented DoubleBlind EncryptionTM, which provides the ability to maintain the data in encrypted form, while retaining fully searchable access to it. Data privacy protection is also enabled by maintaining a separation between encrypted data in the email archive and the encryption keys, which are stored only at the customer's location.
- Fast Search and Retrieval for Easy Legal eDiscovery: With all email content captured in the archive, Proofpoint enables the real-time search across the entire corpus of email – while eliminating the challenges associated with identifying, collecting, and de-duplicating information contained within multiple data sources. Legal eDiscovery teams can conduct full-text searches against message headers, message body, and contents of more than 300 types of attachments.
- Defensible, Standards-based Data Export: Proofpoint utilizes fully automated processes for email data export and archive disposition management, providing full reporting and audit trails, which aid in legal process defensibility. Authorized legal users export data to PST or EDRM XML files without requiring action from Proofpoint support personnel or shipment of data on physical media, which heighten data spoliation risks.
- For Office 365 Legal Users - Robust Legal Discovery Features that Exceed Native 365 Capabilities: Proofpoint Enterprise Archive was designed for customers facing frequent discovery and investigative events, where the need to quickly process large volumes of information is paramount. Proofpoint's robust capabilities to manage granular message retention policies, multiple legal holds, and large message volumes to be filtered and exported via EDRM XML standards ensures that Office 365 customers can address legal discovery requirements without introducing litigation risk.
