Iron Mountain, earlier this week added a new enterprise e-discovery package, Enterprise Discovery Suite, to its long line of products.

This is Iron Mountain's first software suite to unite storage of regular files and emails, classifying them for fast locating and culling down the data for discovery purposes. A previous product -- based on its acquisition of Stratify in 2007 -- addressed just one piece of what is needed in an e-discovery suite.

Chief Marketing Officer T.M. Ravi described the strategy behind the new Enterprise Discovery Suite as an offering "to replace various point products being used in enterprises that don't work together."

The new suite, Ravi said, combines content archiving, legal discovery and data classification functionality. It includes data archiving from Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, file systems and third-party repositories to enable retention policies and legal holds; policy-based search to identify relevant data from endpoint laptops and PCs; early-case assessment to develop case strategy and reduce data volumes; and high-productivity document review in preparation for outside counsel review and production in response to regulatory investigations or litigation.

That all sounds pretty legalese-y, doesn't it?

"In our view, the first problem is that the current approach to enterprise e-discovery is severely broken," Ravi said. "There is an increasing amount of regulation, so the general counsel in a corporation finds that e-discovery costs are completely unpredictable. The general counsel doesn't know if a matter is going to cost him $50K or $2 million.

"The second problem is that discovery is an ad-hoc, reactive, firefighting exercise resulting in severe disruption, with very heavy costs to the enterprise and excessive use of high-priced consultants. What IM is doing with this suite is introducing an approach which treats e-discovery as a critical business process to address enterprise e-discovery needs."

The IM Enterprise Discovery Suite enables collaboration among IT, legal, compliance and information security staff members to proactively respond to legal mandates and requests as well as internal or regulatory investigations.

Components in the suite are:

• Iron Mountain NearPoint, an information archive that functions as a central content repository and provides dynamic retention policies and item-level legal holds for data located in Exchange, file systems, SharePoint and third-party repositories
• Connected Classify & Collect: An on-premise installation that enables policy-based identification and collection of data from endpoint devices including laptops and desktops.
• Iron Mountain eVantage: An on-premises early case assessment installation with high speed processing and advanced analytics for rapid strategy, cost and risk assessment of electronic data in litigation and investigations.
• Iron Mountain Legal Discovery: A service for scalable, high-productivity review that ingests data from the Connected Classify & Collect, NearPoint, eVantage solutions and third-party collections for native file review and tagging with advanced analytics, and portfolio management capabilities for complex matters including secure multi-project team support and automated workflow.
• Iron Mountain Consulting: Proactive litigation readiness planning that addresses records, information and discovery management, as well as complex matter support to help efficiently manage large, complicated matters.

The new e-discovery suite is available now.