eDiscovery Navigator

How to automate application recovery

How to automate application recovery

"Every company has certain applications that must be managed for high availability. Whether driven by business or regulatory mandates, these applications must be available 24/7 or as close to that as possible. Keeping these applications up and running while performing all of their necessary administration and maintenance is a real challenge. Products that meet recovery requirements for both data and apps are starting to appear; however, they're currently geared toward small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and concentrate mainly on Microsoft Exchange.

In the last five years, data recovery technologies have been introduced that let users recover data to almost any desired previous point in time, shorten recovery times to minutes for even very large data sets and minimize the amount of storage capacity required for data protection tasks. But there's a class of apps for which data recovery by itself isn't sufficient. They require recovery of data and of the app itself in the most automated way possible.

The ultimate objective for any recovery operation is to keep the business running; in the case of an application outage, lessening its impact on revenue or customer service is critical. The key recovery metrics are recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). It's therefore important to understand what the recovery requirements are for each app before an appropriate solution can be chosen."

Leaving No Stone Unturned In Data Collection

Leaving No Stone Unturned In Data Collection

"Editor: Could you give us some of your background in technology?

Muir: I started my legal career over 20 years ago as a Legal Services Specialist in the United States Marine Corps. More recently, I was employed by McCarter & English in Newark, New Jersey for twelve years, the last five of which I was the Litigation Support Technology Manager - a position which opened the doors into the litigation support arena. After that, I spent just over a year at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom as a Project Manager in the Legal Technology Department. In May of 2005, I accepted a job with SPi as a Project Manager, spending almost a year in that role, and then transitioned to the consulting side - focusing primarily on the identification, preservation, and collection of electronically stored information (ESI). My responsibilities at SPi include, but are not limited to, the overall management of the collection of ESI and supervision of other companies that we partner with."

Kroll Ontrack Announces List of Common Hard Drive Revival Mistakes to Help Individuals Maximize Data Recovery Success

Kroll Ontrack Announces List of Common Hard Drive Revival Mistakes to Help Individuals Maximize Data Recovery Success

" Kroll Ontrack(R), a leading provider of data recovery and legal technologies products and services, estimates that 30 percent of non-recoverable jobs are the result of human error rather than machine malfunctions. In order to help individuals avoid recovery pitfalls, the company has compiled a list of common mistakes end users commit following a hard drive failure. While Kroll Ontrack can perform recoveries in a number of situations and on virtually any type of operating systems, media and storage devices, avoiding these common blunders can increase the chance of a successful data recovery in your next data loss situation.

-- The user decides they need to completely wipe their drive and restore their data using their backup because they've experienced a data loss situation. A complete reformat and reinstall is performed, only for the user to realize their backup a.) does not work, or b.) is not current. Because the original drive data was wiped, there is little hope of getting back the lost data the user was trying to locate in the first place. To avoid this error, individuals should test their backups by restoring their data to an alternate location before assuming the backup is sound."

Intel Proposes Plan to Restore Lost Documents in AMD Suit

In this continuing saga between Intel and AMD, Intel filed a 39-page document yesterday in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, setting forth its plan to recover lost emails, in accordance with Judge Joseph Farnan's Order.

As part of its plan, Intel also implemented a new email archiving system "that automatically saves all messages from designated document custodians."  (In my previous post, I suggested that the lost emails were due to Intel's email archiving system and procedure.  Naturally, I would like to think that Intel took my suggestion. :)  But seriously, getting a grip on your client's or company's emails is the biggest step you can take to avoid a situation like Intel's, as discussed here and here.)

It is admirable that Intel "wants to set things right," even though the "effort will be a costly one."

(Source: http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200704241338DOWJONESDJONLINE000835_FORTUNE5.htm.)

Court Denied Motion for Forensic Inspection of Hard Drives

Memry Corp. v. Kentucky Oil Tech., N.V., Case No. 04-03843 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 19, 2007) (Not for Citation)

Counterclaim-Defendant Schlumberger Technology Corporation ("STC") moved to compel Defendant/Counterclaim-Plaintiff Kentucky Oil Technology ("KOT") to produce an intellectual property evaluation conducted for one of KOT’s predecessors-in-interest and original documents, including computer hard drives.

Of interest is the latter request in which STC sought KOT's computers and storage media for forensic inspection by a third party consultant pursuant to a protocol to be determined by the parties or the court.  STC's bases for the request are KOT's "selective and incomplete document production" and failure to preserve hard drives.  The court denied STC's request for three reasons.

E-Discovery Survival Guide for Corporate Counsel

Here's a good ediscovery survival guide for corporate counsel:

1.  Update and enforce your records management policies;

2.  Adopt litigation early warnings strategies;

3.  Implement detailed litigation hold;

4.  Review your computer use policies with ediscovery in mind;

5.   Educate your legal, administrative, and IT staff on the fundamentals of ediscovery;

6.   Adopt collection plans for electronically stored information ("ESI");

7.  Don't forget to consider all possible sources of ESI -- see here and here.

8.  Designate an ediscovery liaison;

9.  Monitor the ediscovery process;

10.  Stay up to date on ediscovery issues.

Note: I added numbers 7 and 9 to the list discussed in the article hyperlinked above.

(Source: Smith, Arthur L., "United States: E-Discovery Survival Guide For Corporate Counsel," (Feburary 19, 2007).)