Legal Industry
The legal industry is placed in an interesting position with regard to data archiving and records retention. While there are no specific regulations that determine how legal firms or individual law offices must retain data (as in the healthcare industry), entities in the legal industry must be prepared to encounter, and be subject to, any number of existing regulations. Attorneys working with the U.S. federal courts must comply with Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) for eDiscovery as well as any equivalent versions implemented at state levels, or if in the UK, Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) applies.
The American Bar Association (ABA) and ARMA International offer best practices for records management (RM) in the legal industry that counsel the benefits of establishing retention policies. Law offices and/or corporations face many considerations when setting appropriate legal data retention periods including: federal and state regulations, intellectual property requirements, statutes of limitations and general business and contractual requirements that could extend data retention periods. Additionally, client and corporate privacy is of utmost concern.
Recovery and compliance solutions must be capable of archiving electronically stored information (ESI) such as text, email, images and telephony [in their native formats]. All archived information including digital content and image and email archives, must be easily accessible and rapidly retrievable.
Alliance's archiving solutions meet the rigorous data protection and privacy requirements of law firms while fulfilling the need for indisputable systems that protect valuable corporate and client records while mitigating risks.
Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. (Alliance) offers recovery and compliance solutions that are both cost-effective, secure, and support the rigorous requirements associated with legal matters.
For many years, Alliance has worked with key technology partners to provide complete archiving solutions to the legal industry. Alliance's archiving solutions and libraries seamlessly integrate with industry leading software applications to provide a complete operating platform supporting records, discovery and case management.
Legal Solution Benefits
Preserving Data Unaltered – Alliance's solutions are based upon true Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) optical technology. Encrypted data is written to optical media after which it becomes unalterable remaining intact for periods greater than 50 years.
Encryption – With this optional feature, data at-rest is encrypted with unique keys for each object using FIPS 140-2 compliant AES-256 encryption algorithm. Encryption adds another layer of security to your data enabling compliance with specific regulations and ensuring that all data remains confidential.
Transmission Security and Integrity – Alliance's NAS solutions integrate seamlessly with existing storage networks presenting as a standard TCP/IP resource with support for CIFS, NFS, and FTP protocols. The server security-administration ensures that it can recognize and approve validated clients.
Email and Image Archiving – Partnering with industry-leaders, Alliance's solutions integrate with third-party software applications that manage and sort email and images according to the internal policy guidelines established within that application. The images and email are then stored efficiently and securely on Alliance's NAS optical libraries that fit directly into the existing storage network. Note that a Direct Attached library can be used however, it will require a third-party software application.
Fast & Random Access to Data -Data can be randomly accessed either from the optical media archives or high-performance RAID depending upon established policies.
Scalable/Expandable Archiving – Expandable optical disk archive systems are based upon high-capacity media magazines and scalable robotic libraries. As data storage requirements increase, libraries can be easily expanded within the same footprint offering investment protection through capacity expansions and future-proof system upgrades.
Low Total Cost of Ownership - After the data is permanently written on the media, it no longer requires a constant power source to maintain the data. This greatly reduces costs associated with storing archived data for the required lifespan. Additionally, the removable media offers an affordable disaster recovery solution. Systems reduce overhead and operating costs by: minimizing the cost and frequency of data migrations through extended media life, removing static data from expensive primary and backup systems freeing up valuable resources, and lowering power, cooling and maintenance costs. Systems scale incrementally as data archiving needs expand.
