Your employee has mobile devices connected with your system network while your remote employee relies on Skype, emails and other means of communication. This digital data turns into your digital record during a legal proceedings and known as Electronic Stored Information in the law language. You never know when you will have to provide electronic data and information to lawyers or regulatory authorities. So, if you want to stay compliant and plan to manage all the risks associated with data, then you need to understand the role of e-discovery. Today, I am going to explain how e-discovery helps you with risk management and compliance. Are you ready to uncover all the information? Let’s get to that
What is e-Discovery?
Think of e-discovery as a digital investigation whose purpose is to find evidence in emails, texts or other data during a lawsuit or criminal proceedings. Basically, your data is stored digitally and then a case is created by an e-discovery specialist. Now this specialist runs discovery on specific electronic data with an intention to find and provide information that is requested during a lawsuit or internal investigation.
The Role of E-Discovery in Risk Management and Compliance
Have you understood the concept of e-discovery? It’s time to know what role it performs
Data Governance and Compliance
You need to follow specific regulations and laws related to data protection and privacy.
The e-Discovery makes it easy for your organization to enforce data protection and privacy policies. Whether you use Microsoft eDiscovery or relies on a third-part e-discovery platform, you will prevent legal penalties and risks of non-compliance.
Litigation and Legal Risks Mitigation
You don’t know when you will have to encounter a legal case or litigations, so when you have e-discovery setup, you will be ready to handle this case quickly. You can find, collect and provide electronic evidence on demand. If you want to defend your organization against lawsuits, and planning to respond quickly to legal request, e-discovery comes in handy. Imagine, you won’t have this setup and a legal lawsuit is there. It means you will have to delay the law process and this delay will damage your reputation while costing you money.
On the flip side, you can provide ESI quickly with e-discovery and can easily prevent litigation costs while keeping your organization’s reputation intact.
Risk Identification and Assessment
E-discovery helps your organization during internal investigation and risk assessment. As you know, insiders also pose serious risks and threats to your business as well. You won’t know what employee or manager is a threat. However, when you perform proactive data assessment, it becomes easy for you to identify potential risk and prevent intellectual property theft. Many times when you continuously monitor all the electronic data and files, you can find risks and fix the issue before it escalates into some serious cyber threat or attack.
Information Security and Data Protection
When you rely on the best e-discovery platform then it will unlock multiple security measures to protect data further. For example, data is encrypted during transfer to prevent confidential data theft.
Access control measures are taken to ensure that no unauthorized personnel can access the data to misuse it. There are multiple data loss prevention strategies that ediscovery platform offers. Your organization can identify and mitigate risk of authorized access, data breach, and cyber attack through it.
If you store all your data on a robust data storage platform such as sharearchiver, you will be able to enjoy next level data protection. This platform allow you to run a discovery on electronic data instantaneously and then get the info you need without slowing down the system. Beside, it is integrated with data protection tools so you will know that data will remain protected whether store or put in archive.
Policy Enforcement and Employee Training
According to Entrepreneur, 20 percent of organizations faced security breaches due to remote workers. IBM reports confirm that more than 88 percent of data breaches happen due to employee. Employees are human beings and their mistakes can cost an organization millions.
So, when it comes to protecting your organizational data and enforce data protection policies, you need to spend money on employee education. This training is crucial because your employee must know all about data retention and deletion.
If you don’t spend time on employee awareness campaigns, then they can make the mistake. Let’s say you have to provide some Electronic data regarding a specific employee during a lawsuit and that person accidentally delete the files required. This deletion will cost you legal penalties and increase the risk of non-compliance. However, through Microsoft 365 eDiscovery Premium, you can put that employee data on hold and that employee won’t be able to delete any data or file requested by legal authorities for investigation.
Another scenario is internal investigation. E-Discovery will help you get all the information you need to understand employee conduct and hold the responsible person behind a data breach accountable.
Regulatory Audit and Report
Your organization has to provide electronic records and communication during an audit to an auditor and regulatory bodies. When you have an e-discovery system in place, it helps you with timely retrieval of all electronic data requested by authorities, and auditors. It will streamline your audit process and help you continue your business without facing any litigation or reputational risk.
Adoption to Latest Regulation
Regulatory authorities keep updating policies and laws. When you use an e-discovery platform that stays up to date with the latest technological and regulatory requirements, you can have peace of mind. It’s because you will know that e-discovery will help you solidify your compliance and risk management strategies.
Wrap up
Indeed, e-discovery plays a vital role in Risk management and compliance. Every organization has to use a proactive risk management approach and rely on a reliable and robust ediscovery platform. It will help you find and mitigate legal, regulatory and operational risks related to electronic data. You can definitely minimize legal penalties while maximizing your public reputation and enhancing your overall governance via it. Thereby, try to pick the best platform that follows latest governance requirements.
