With the surge of volumes and dependency on email, as much as 70% of business-critical information is stored within corporate messaging systems. Email is mission critical, yet many firms treat email servers as corporate intelligence repositories.

Research has shown that there are more than 10,000 laws and regulations in the United States alone drafted by federal and state legislative bodies, with the common thread running through these regulations being that they address “records” - information that takes many of the forms discussed earlier. These regulations also address the process by which records must be created, stored, accessed, maintained, and retained over increasingly long periods of time, in some cases, beyond the life of a human. Compliance impacts the entire organization and crosses boundaries between the IT side of the house and the business side, including stakeholders typically not involved in decision-making such as legal departments or Chief Compliance Officers.

Over the past decade, technology has played a major role in the shift from paper documents as the information medium to electronic documents, which include spreadsheets, presentations, word processing documents, emails and instant messages. While paper documents once were the most common medium for transmitting information, technology has shifted the medium to online. According to an analysis from UC Berkeley, 93% of all information today is created in an electronic format.