The digital universe is vast and ever expanding at an incredible rate. Market intelligence firm IDC’s 2011 Digital Universe study found that the amount of information created and replicated in 2011 exceeded 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes). That’s a lot of data. And more importantly, companies are liable for 80 percent of this information at some point in its digital life.
When it comes down to it, both the legal and IT departments need to do something about this gargantuan amount of data. Most companies have records management policies in place to handle information critical to a company’s business and interests, as well as a corresponding set of records retention schedules that identify record categories, regulatory requirements and the period of time for which they need to be kept before being destroyed.
