90% of Large Enterprise Archiving Projects Fail

ZL Technologies, Inc., provider of enterprise software solutions for e-mail and files archiving for
regulatory compliance, litigation support, corporate governance, and
storage management, answered the hard questions to ask vendors that can help avoid failure in large records management projects.
 
The task of electronic records retention and management in large enterprises is still relatively new and the challenges are daunting. The sheer volume of data far exceeds any other application in the large enterprise, with the number of, say, e-mails being generated in one year typically exceeding the total number of documents in the U.S. Library of Congress.

In addition to the challenge of scaling to handle such staggering data volumes, the archiving system must also be flexible enough to accommodate the fast-changing requirements of the large enterprise, which have evolved rapidly through storage reduction, regulatory compliance, litigation support and records management.

Lacking in scalability and flexibility, the archiving products available in the marketplace are mostly unable to deliver the performance required in large records management projects. For these projects, failure rates have reached 90% and over. To minimize the risk of failure, ZL Technologies has collected below a series of key questions which relate to breaking points encountered in many of the failed projects.

Of the many hurdles facing archiving, the most critical issues relate to the search engine. Archiving, in the most fundamental essence, is not about storage, but about finding. Without the ability to find, the storage capability is rendered meaningless.

To assess the search capabilities,
these are three of the key questions to ask of all vendors:

1. How fast is the search across all mailboxes? Due to a weak search engine, most archiving solutions try to narrow the search to a small portion of the data, such as 50 mailboxes or ‘custodians.’ However, this can result in damaging conclusions in many search instances, such as for early case assessment. For example, a gender-bias lawsuit against the Los Angeles office may beg the question as to how widespread the problem is. But narrowing the search to only the Los Angeles office could overlook problems in other offices across the country. Litigation strategies based on such incomplete assessments may result in wrong decisions. Incidentally, it often comes as a surprise to users that the archiving solution may take days or weeks to do such a thorough search across a database of, say, 10,000 mailboxes or fewer.
2. How accurate is the search? Search accuracy is just as important to e-discovery as search speed, especially in finding the most relevant documents and in reducing the cost of legal time to review search results. Search capabilities such as proximity search (finding a word within n words of another) are critically important to reduce false positives. It should be noted that many well-known archiving products are not able to do proximity search. A related but equally unsettling flaw is inaccurate or inconsistent searches whereby search results can change depending on the order of search words. For example, searching for ‘promise’ within 5 words of ‘stock’ could return different results from ‘stock’ within 5 words of ‘promise.’ With such inaccuracies, the archive runs the risk of non-responsiveness, inadvertent liability exposure, privileged waivers, or worse.
3. Does the archive’s search engine have a future? Or will it trigger punitive costs ahead? The life of a search engine plays a critical factor in the success of the archive. Some archiving products use an obsolete or end-of-life search engine, such as AltaVista, where a replacement will soon be necessary. However, when the replacement does happen, users will either be saddled with a massive cost of data migration to the new search engine, or encumbered with the high cost of running two separate archives. These hidden costs should be factored in the purchase decision, as they could exceed even the original acquisition cost.

“The above points represent only a few of the many critical elements needed for success in archiving implementations,” said Kon Leong, ZL’s CEO. “Other key elements include assessing the real cost of ownership and the quality of support for a complex application. The market is still in its developing stages and there needs to be a continuing education on the important issues.”