19th August 2007

SUPERMARKETS IN EMAIL PROBE: THE ESSENTIAL PERSPECTIVE

Two of the UK's supermarket giants have been ordered to hand over millions of e-mails and letters as part of a Competition Commission investigation.

Comments from Keith Quinn, Managing Director at Essential:

“This incident highlights the importance of having a strategy for retaining e-mails, and a capability to respond quickly in the event of a discovery request.

It is interesting to note that the parties in this case are keen to publicly show they “have nothing to Hide” and are “doing what we can to assist the commission with this enormous data request”. This demonstrates that the risks are not only from the regulators, but also the potential for damaging publicity.

It's amazing that even now we still see many organisations who have no data retention or retrieval capability, and put the responsibility for what e-mails should be retained in the hands of the users.

Essential recently assisted an organisation with extracting and converting over 20 million messages locked into an archive, so they could respond to a discovery request. We think a lot of organisations are seriously underestimating the costs of discovery requests by not having an appropriate system in place from the beginning."

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