There is nothing particularly glamorous or exciting about archiving. It lacks the cut and thrust of courtroom battles over eDiscovery / eDisclosure, and perhaps seems mundane when compared with the new frontier of predictive coding, that place where technology, jurisprudence and the business of being a lawyer meet.

 An article by Bob Spurzem, Senior Product Marketing Manager for EMC’s Backup Recovery Systems, draws attention to the role played by e-mail archive in recent stories about General Petraeus and about the battle between Apple and Samsung.

Its role seems set to grow, as growing concern about security breaches and eDiscovery costs forces the realisation that leaving the problem until a discovery / disclosure request is made is not an adequate business strategy.

The eDiscovery / eDisclosure world is perhaps beginning to realise, at last, that the root of the problem lies off the left-hand side of the EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) – we heard a lot about the “move to the left” three or four years ago, and email archive repositories became more usual then. We are in a second phase now, one in which an archive is more than just a cheaper place to dump old data.

EMC’s roots lie in storage, but its business stretches across across the EDRM. If one were to compare eDiscovery / eDisclosure to a house, an archive is the foundation. You have to keep patching the walls and roof, but sooner rather than later you need to be sure that the foundations are secure.