– Jim McGann, VP of Information Discovery, Index Engines (www.indexengines.com), says:
Email is the most common source of evidence when facing legal and other regulatory investigations. Managing and preserving email in a defensible manner is critical to support lawsuits and investigations. Botched collection of email has been known to lose cases and also result in significant sanctions and fines.
Forensic level culling and archiving of email is required to ensure both accuracy and defensibility when collecting and preserving sensitive corporate records on legal hold. Forensic archiving does not convert email but saves it in its original bit-level format and extracts it from the email database (i.e. MS Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes). The sophistication of forensic archiving cannot be easily replicated nor can its significance be disputed when dealing with key evidence in an important lawsuit.
With that in mind, Index Engines, a New Jersey based software manufacturer specializing in information management products, released the new Octane Forensic Archive for Litigation Hold. This new forensic archive indexes MS Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes email, allowing for full content and metadata culling. Indexing of the email database is performed using a unique bit for bit indexing process. MAPI based crawling tools are not utilized as they are slow and cannot process any content that does not have a viable crawl path (i.e. corrupt or partial EBD’s as an example). Bit level indexing will process the entire email database including deleted email residing in the tombstone or dumpster. This approach ensures comprehensive access to all email and not limited to what MAPI based tools can crawl.
Once email is culled, and tagged as responsive, it can be extracted from the database. Index Engines has the ability to extract email from disk, forensic images or even backup tapes. Extracted email is not converted to eml or msg formats, it is preserved in its bit format. Extracting John Doe’s mailbox will only extract the specific bits that define this mailbox and hold it in a culled forensic image. No other ESI collection platform can preserve email in this manner since they do not have bit level knowledge of the database structure.
The new Octane Forensic Archive for litigation hold demonstrates Index Engines’ dedication to solutions for cost effective, secure collecting and preserving of ESI. As well as, the unique ability to have detailed, bit-level knowledge of email databases which allows us to introduce this new breakthrough in forensically sound email collection and preservation.
About the Author
Jim McGann is the eDiscovery expert and VP of Information Discovery for Index Engines (www.indexengines.com). Based in New Jersey, Index Engines’ patented discovery platform provides corporate and legal clients with comprehensive insight into their data to simplify information discovery, classification and management. Email Jim at jim.mcgann@indexengines.com.
