Case Study
FTI Technology Provides Digital Safe Data Disposition for Global Bank
Struggling to manage decades of archived data and reduce its data footprint subject to litigation, a large international bank engaged FTI Technology to develop a process for defensible disposition of legacy data in its global Digital Safe archive.
Situation
As part of an ongoing global data disposition project, the organization was addressing risks relating to e-discovery, compliance and over-retention of data. Due to a high volume of unnecessary data within the archive, the organization was at increased risk for compliance violations, was paying excessive IT licensing fees and was grappling with deteriorating quality of its data repositories.
Establishing a modernized and risk resilient data archive required implementation of preservation, retention and deletion functions that were not available within the organization’s existing system. The system’s limitations also left the client with no cost-effective option for migrating to a new platform. As a result, the organization’s only option was to reduce the data footprint and introduce customized features to manage its data retention and disposal program going forward.
The initiative required parsing through large volumes of legacy data spanning decades and approximately 17,000 custodians who had been placed under legal hold obligations.
Our Role
FTI Technology was engaged to design a novel solution and workflow to address the legacy archive.
The team partnered with stakeholders from the client’s legal, e-discovery, IT and archiving teams to build a framework for data disposition across global systems to reduce the amount of data subject to litigation, reduce licensing costs and automate legal holds. The project included:
- Development of custom scripts to communicate with the legal hold management system, accurately identify and track custodians with data in the archive and remediate data quality issues.
- Workflows to accurately identify and track custodians who were under existing and/or previous legal holds.
- Analysis to separate legacy and expired data from data that still needed to be preserved.
- Validation of legal hold inventory and export of policies and scripts to automate retention and deletion within the archive for data spanning tens of thousands of individuals.
Our Impact
FTI Technology’s work significantly reduced the client’s archive footprint by tens of terabytes of data, resulting in significant cost savings for the IT and legal departments.
By resolving challenging data quality issues, FTI Technology’s automated and defensible methodology reduced the risk of accidental data deletion and potential fines.
With a reduced archive footprint and rationalization of custodians, the client was equipped to automate legal hold preservation policies against its legacy data and migrate data into modern systems efficiently and costeffectively.