Litigation may be the last thing on IT’s mind as it evaluates software-as-a-service options for the enterprise. Unfortunately, litigation and e-discovery–the act of finding, preserving, and analyzing electronic information–are facts of life. If your company gets dragged into a lawsuit and relevant information is stored inside a provider’s cloud, you need to know that information is available on demand.
That’s why IT should add e-discovery criteria to its list of considerations when evaluating SaaS providers, particularly when looking at services such as hosted e-mail and e-mail archiving, PC and file-share backups, and other information sources that create a legal data trail. No company wants to find that a SaaS application it purchased to streamline operations suddenly has become a major hurdle to its e-discovery obligations.
Fortunately, many of the criteria, including storage and performance, that IT already uses to evaluate SaaS providers can be applied to e-discovery. However, there also are e-discovery-specific requirements that must be considered, such as fine-grained control over retention and disposition of data, and the ability to quickly retrieve information from the service provider’s system.
