CommVault Adds eDiscovery and Legal Hold Capabilities to Simpana

Responding to the need for organizations to preserve and protect their information when litigation is reasonably anticipated, CommVault the availability of an advanced Legal Hold feature set, extending the capabilities of the eDiscovery features in the CommVault Simpana 7.0 software suite.

CommVault’s Legal Hold capability spans both archive and backup stores to help ensure information is preserved. By maintaining a legally defensible audit trail, these features allow customers to reduce the risks associated with non-compliance with regulations such as the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) for eDiscovery as well as preserving the evidentiary integrity of content for court submission.

With powerful features and no need for additional licensing to enable a wide-ranging eDiscovery toolkit, the Legal Hold capability uses a comprehensive, automated approach to search and retrieve data from backups, archives or any Electronically Stored Information (ESI) — such as emails and files — and retain a subset of the data for long-term accessibility. CommVault Legal Hold helps customers defensibly preserve responsive information that may already be under multiple retention policies. CommVault’s Legal Hold also embraces object level holds, beyond file-based, for a granular level of recovery for both vaulted backup sets and archives at the message or document level.

Post-hold considerations are also supported within the Legal Hold feature set, allowing post-hold data and content to be retained or removed as required.

Industry Demand for Legal Hold Solutions Calls for Sophisticated Features and Combined Archive and Backup Stores
A legal hold is a process used by an organization to preserve all forms of relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated.
Unlike traditional Legal Hold technologies which treat archives as a single entity and only tag messages located inside the archived storage pool, CommVault’s Legal Hold feature spans both backups and archives, preserving data in all storage pools based on normal retention policies.
Not limited to legal action, users abiding by internal governance rules can also leverage the Legal Hold feature set for adherence to company policies that mandate the retention and disposal of certain documents and information.

As a result of CommVault’s unique Singular Information Management approach to Legal Hold, specific features and benefits are made available to customers including:

• Advanced search result views which allows users to utilize annotation tags and organize search results;
• Powerful filters that enable users to quickly identify and reduce the number of files and email messages needed for review to make better legal decisions, meet deadlines and avoid sanctions;
• Giving users the ability to save queries and control how results are displayed. This allows relevant items to then be easily designated for Legal Hold where collections are defined by case-specific retention rules; and
• Flexible post-hold management capabilities allow the reclassification, consolidation and/or timely destruction of held content, regardless of infrastructure.

Supporting Quotes:
"CommVault software has helped to mitigate the pain of backup and recovery and has allowed my IT team to make significant progress in meeting legal, compliance and discovery demands," said Sarita Bennett, IT Policy and Projects manager, Carmarthenshire County Council in the United Kingdom. "The ability to leverage these capabilities from a singular, unified console has saved us time in training, overall storage management and everyday archiving functions."

"ESG Research suggests that one out of every two organizations, regardless of size or industry, have been through an electronic discovery event in the past twelve months. As such, they are forced to preserve more and more information to meet legal hold requirements. Properly managing ongoing retention requirements creates additional IT overhead and costs," said Brian Babineau, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "CommVault Simpana software offers robust flexibility for organizations dealing with recurring electronic discovery requests, particularly those in post-hold activity, by offering reclassification of held content, data movement and consolidation with existing data stores, across backup, archive or both."

"We believe the fact that electronic evidence may be scattered across countless locations and diverse electronic formats has increased the risk organizations face when preparing for pre-trial conferences or litigation proceedings," said Michael Marchi, vice president of product and segment marketing, CommVault. "With CommVault’s unique Singular Information Management approach, however, ESI is managed from one standard interface and pooled into a single repository for collection. This makes implementing CommVault for legal hold and preservation a much easier, lower risk proposition for many enterprises than purchasing separate point solutions and cobbling them together."
"Today, the CommVault Simpana suite is the only product on the market that offers customers a single unified management platform that combines data protection, archiving, search, replication and resource management technologies, thereby eliminating the need for customers to deploy multiple point solutions and enabling added benefits including increased cost and operational savings," added Marchi.

More about CommVault Simpana 7.0 Software Suite:
Archiving Module
CommVault Legal Hold Whitepaper