Despite the potential upcoming rollback on the Sarbanes-Oxley rules, there is a new wind blowing.  The U.S. Supreme court approved rules in April, which took effect on December 1st.  These rules now require any business to retain electronic records - such as emails, instant messages and text documents - and be able to retrieve them in economically feasible.  The rules also require IT managers within those companies to be able to show how electronic records are stored and what mechanisms are used to retrieve them, as well as when and how those records are deleted.

For more on the details on what the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure actual require businesses to do, here are some references:

The specifics of the Federal Rules are here.  An overview of the impact of the new rulings, an alert from AxsOne (a leading records retention compliance company) and a series of webcasts on electronic discovery are also available.

A study by the Enterpise Strategy Group (ESG) notes that 90% of organizations with more than 20,000 employees have experienced an electronic discovery within the past 12 months.  Yet, ironically, another study by Cohasset Associates noted that almost half of all organizations have no email retention policy!  As part of a litigation readiness program, a corporate retention program seems like a good place to start.

Finally, it seems that ESG also found that about half of organizations surveyed said that they found "retrieving data from such offline media as tape was a significant challenge" and that they had a "lack of effective software tools to search for and retrieve information."

I'm thinking that all this is going to bode well for the managed CAS market.  What's your thought?