Zantaz, an Autonomy (News - Alert) company and vendor in the archiving, eDiscovery and Proactive Information Risk Management markets, has announced Desktop Legal Hold, what the Zantazzies describe as a product to let corporate legal and IT departments "remotely enforce legal hold across desktops and laptops."

"Unlike other systems," Zantaz officials say, "Desktop Legal Hold does not require a continuous network connection for discovery. Information and metadata are preserved locally and continuously in real-time. The product locks down the original files in place and can collect them when an Internet connection is established."

Applying advanced conceptual and keyword legal search, "all information relevant to legal matters is preserved, maintaining the audit trail and forensic credibility while dramatically reducing the legal risk of fines and sanctions associated with non-compliance to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for eDiscovery," Zantaz officials say.

In the July 2007 Forrester report, "Warning: Combine Process Methodology and Technology to Execute Litigation Holds," Barry Murphy wrote that "the U.S. courts show no mercy to organizations that claim ignorance about the processes or technology to preserve potentially relevant information. In the court's eyes, there is simply no excuse for being unable to find information -- whether it be e-mails, instant messages, voicemails, desktop files, or even ERP data -- when requested."

A couple months ago Autonomy announced that version 6 of both its Enterprise Archive Product and Introspect software are now powered by IDOL. Autonomy Zantaz sells the Proactive Information Risk Management products.

Information Risk Management is "the act of mitigating the risks endemic to the everyday production of excess amounts of data through intelligent archiving, automated policy management and advanced eDiscovery," according to Autonomy officials.

The full spectrum of offerings include media restoration, consolidated archiving, advanced electronic data discovery, review, production, real-time policy management and analytics.

The entire spectrum is now based on one common platform -- Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer. IDOL automates the understanding and processing of all sources of operational information including e-mail, instant messages, files, applications, voice and video.

The explosion of unstructured information such as e-mails, documents, instant messaging, audio, video, blogs and Web pages, Autonomy officials believe, "has introduced new challenges and potential threats to organizations regarding business operations, regulations and litigation preparedness. Regulatory changes mandate that all electronic information is discoverable and therefore organizations are now required to apply retention policies to far more than just e-mail."

In the report "Abysmal: The State of Retention Management" (Forrester Research (News - Alert), Inc., July 2007), Barry Murphy writes that the gap between where organizations are today and where they should be is "enormous. As a result, eDiscovery costs are high and repetitive. But the days of stakeholders looking the other way as legal teams spend millions of dollars per month on eDiscovery are over."

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.