Xiotech Wants You to Comply

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Xiotech has unveiled an appliance that the company says gives corporations an easy answer to compliance and e-discovery demands.

Xiotech’s CEMS, or Corporate Evidence Management System, can store from 2 to 6 terabytes of captured documents, handling anywhere from 10,000 to 80,000 documents a day, with de-duplication technology available in the larger unit.

CEMS “proactively captures, classifies, manages and controls the thousands of electronic files organizations generate that can potentially become evidence in a legal or compliance action,” Xiotech states. CEMS also detects incidents so organizations can manage potential issues as they occur.

Xiotech says CEMS captures and controls electronic business information as it is authored and routed across an organization, then inspects each document and provides policy-based, automated classification based on retention, destruction and regulatory compliance requirements. A copy of each document is then saved in the CEMS repository. CEMS search, audit, analysis, tagging, legal hold and production capabilities help organizations manage compliance and discovery events.

Xiotech says every document captured in CEMS is treated as if it were a business record and potential legal evidence, and notifications can be sent to designated individuals for any e-mail or document which violates a policy defined in CEMS. CEMS users can then access the offending document and investigate and resolve the incident using CEMS management tools.

Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said CEMS makes compliance easy for end users. “Today, most customers have to buy separate archiving software and hardware to achieve these capabilities,” he said.

Xiotech’s policy library, indexing, search and management features let customers establish and enforce retention periods, legal holds and other rules from a centralized location, said Babineau.

Babineau said e-mail was a good place to start, since ESG estimates that 77 percent of organizations that have been through an electronic discovery have had to produce e-mail, but he said he expects future versions of CEMS to support other content types. “This will allow organizations to consistently enforce policies across all content types,” he said.

Xiotech said its own research suggests that only 39 percent of companies have a working system for implementing legal holds to prevent the inadvertent destruction of evidence, and only a quarter of organizations have taken steps to comply with the revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Xiotech CEO Casey Powell said organizations “are often the last to know about the risks associated with their own information. But CEMS puts our customers in control. It’s proactive — CEMS can detect incidents before they grow into something much more serious.”

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