M&A Activity Makes the Case for Intelligent Desktop Collection

18
Nov
2010

Ursula Talley

Over the past few years we’ve seen a significant increase in mergers and acquisitions across a range of industries.  However, the financial services industry in particular has seen a substantial increase of M&A activity.  Currently, the total number of bank failures this year has risen to 143, surpassing 2009 numbers – and of course most of these failed bank assets have been acquired. According to a recent article in Barron’s:  “The U.S. Banking industry already has shrunk through consolidation to about 8,000 banks from roughly 14,000 in 1980, and that trend will continue, says Toos Daruvala, head of the Americas Banking and Securities practice at McKinsey.  Of the fifth- to 20th-largest banks by asset size today, only 10 or 12 will be independent in three years, he predicts.”

Consolidating businesses whether in financial services or other verticals, presents a myriad of challenges, including how to deal with requirements for retaining electronically stored information (ESI).  When a deal is completed, the acquiring entity automatically assumes all the legal responsibilities and liabilities related to the acquired party’s information, along with the infrastructure.  And given the explosive growth in ESI over the past decade, this can feel like a monumental and even insurmountable task. That is why it is essential that – as part of the due diligence process – both parties demonstrate they have implemented a comprehensive information management strategy and can define a process by which information will be identified, secured and retained for any compliance requirement as they embark on their integration plans.

As the acquiring entities try to get a handle on all of their data, one area that can be particularly challenging is gaining visibility into and control over information as it resides in desktops throughout a distributed organization. This level of visibility is crucial in a myriad of ways related to compliance, security and legal obligations. Another area that has become a particular pain point for companies is managing the electronic discovery (eDiscovery) process across employee computers.  New requirements have emerged in litigation which require parties to be able to collect, preserve and present information upon request – an especially difficult challenge for an organization that has inherited legacy data through an acquisition or merger.  As a result, companies are now trying to define a repeatable process for collecting and preserving data from corporate desktops and laptops.  While less than 20 percent of the total data typically collected during eDiscovery comes from desktops, it seems that 80 percent of the problems occur during the desktop collection process.  To deal with this challenge, data source integrations have been developed using “agent-less and gateway-less” technology.  However, given the often remote and distributed nature of desktops and the inherent pain of desktop collections, the desktop collection process can be vastly improved by deploying an intelligent desktop agent.

Having surveyed companies using commercial and home grown desktop collection solutions, it was very surprising to find out that most companies were still using manual IT processes that require an actual visit to each and every desktop, interrupting the end user for a number of hours, and over-collecting data by about 90 percent.  These processes are manual, prone to error, and very often require multiple revisits as additional custodians (data owners) were identified as potentially relevant to a legal case.

The survey found that, for those companies that had invested in automation, many of these solutions would literally collect every bit of data from every desktop, drag this data across low bandwidth, latency ridden networks; and without any intelligent way to manage incremental, ongoing collections.  Others avoided the technical issues altogether, but were absorbing legal risk by only collecting documents with certain extensions, in certain directories; clearly exposing the organization by not evaluating all potentially relevant custodian data.

In contrast, an intelligent desktop collection solution can save time and resources by evaluating all desktop data, but only collecting potentially relevant user files across the network without interruption to the end user.  While the desktop collection problem clearly benefits from the added intelligence and simplicity in the form of an agent, IT organizations may prefer to avoid managing another agent across 10s or 100s of thousands of desktops when, in most cases, only 15 to 30 desktops really need to be collected. The answer is – and with minimal TOC in mind – a temporary desktop agent solution that can be deployed in minutes and automatically uninstall at the culmination of all collection tasks, and do so without end-user involvement.

Mergers and acquisitions impose challenges across the organization, but in particular there is a large burden placed on the IT department to manage the consolidation of IT assets, and to do so in accordance with governance, compliance and recent eDiscovery mandates.  As corporate consolidation continues, ensuring you’re able to efficiently and thoroughly collect and control data stored on desktops is more important than ever.  By adopting an intelligent desktop collection solution, organizations can vastly improve the speed and efficiency of the data collection process, while maintaining the all important legally defensible audit trail.