Symantec recently released the results of its 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey. The survey reached the legal and IT management departments of 1680 enterprises in 26 countries. It sought to identify the best (and worst) practices in the field. One hundred Canadian companies took part in the exercise. Unfortunately, the results reveal that Canadian companies suffer a serious gap. On a worldwide basis, 87% of the participants were aware that a proper information retention plan will help them delete unnecessary information, but only 46% do have such a retention plan. Costs and responsibility attribution are cited by both IT and legal departments as the main reasons why no plan is put in place. Further reasons identified, by IT, are the lack of a need for a plan and, by legal, the lack of expertise. This gap is even wider – one of the largest, according to the study – in Canada. Although a similar proportion of the companies (80%) recognized the utility of an information retention plan, only 15% had a plan in place (yep, in bold and italics!). While the first figure is, in a sense, reassuring, the gap between those who took action and those who haven’t yet means only one thing: the next step is stepping in. The other findings of the study (PDF) relating to over-retention, improper legal hold, backup, recovery and archive practices all point in the direction of a set of consequences:

“First, high storage costs. Studies show that storage costs continue to skyrocket as over retention has created an environment where it is now 1,500 times more expensive to review data than it is to store it. And it is not just the raw cost of tape stock and hard disks, but the higher costs of managing such massive stores. Second, backup windows are bursting at the seams. It is becoming increasingly common to hear of weekend backups taking more than a single weekend. Recovery times are even worse. The time it takes to restore such massive backups will bring any disaster recovery program to its knees. Finally, with the massive amounts of information stored on difficult-to-access backup tapes, eDiscovery has become a lengthy, inefficient and costly exercise.”

While these consequences are serious, so are the short-to-middle-terms benefits of the remedy. It would be a missed opportunity not to remind you that Ledjit is Bridging the gap between IT and the law!