The business world has gone digital. With all that electronic information floating around there’s an urgent need to figure out what’s out there (including emails, social media posts, instant messages, and text messages). Why is this important? Just ask your general counsel or chief compliance officer. Whether for litigation, regulatory audits or other internal investigations, companies have a vital need to find relevant, accurate information quickly.

The key to a successful e-discovery process is having good information governance strategy, policies, and practices in place. This means your firm has spent time figuring out where content should go, what should be preserved, and how it should be retained. This is the difference between being proactive and reactive—which could save your firm a bundle of money when the time comes for e-discovery.

Implementing archiving as part of a smart information governance program can make your e-discovery faster, easier (and a lot less expensive). Here’s how:

• Reduce processing and review costs. The e-discovery process is expensive. However, when digital records are captured in an intelligent archive, they are not only safely stored, but the information has been indexed and is immediately available in a search-ready format. This means when it comes time for discovery, your firm can locate the specific information it needs and produce it quickly—in a fraction of the time it would have taken if the info was simply sitting on a back-up tape and needed to be sorted through manually. Less time to find and cull data = big cost savings.

• Painless audits. Ok, no one can make an audit entirely painless, but archiving can go a long way in helping. Not only is it going to allow you to quickly locate and produce the data you need, but a good solution will also provide a full audit trail and show that you’ve maintained the chain of custody. If needed, your firm can also demonstrate to a regulator what policies were used for records retention, when the policies were applied, who created the policies, and so on.

• Defensible deletion. Keeping data forever isn’t cost-effective, for storage or e-discovery purposes. It’s also not practical from a legal perspective. Good retention policies that are set up within an archiving solution can help enforce the defensible disposal of records, once legal and/or regulatory requirements have been fulfilled. This process must also be auditable to show compliance with laws and regulations, to protect a company from future litigation.

• Prevent spoiled data. The negligent or intentional mishandling of evidence relevant to a legal case is called spoilage. You don’t want this. A comprehensive archiving solution allows your firm to quickly and easily place legal holds and enforce policies that prevent the alteration or deletion of relevant data.

• Align compliance and legal. A company’s information governance and archiving practices must cater to the requirements of compliance and legal teams, which have unique records retention obligations. A comprehensive archiving solution that stores all digital communications in one unified platform can help different teams manage specific records retention requirements, and be more prepared in the event of an audit, an investigation, or litigation.

By including a comprehensive archiving solution as part of your information governance program, your firm can more efficiently manage the entire start-to-finish flow of how information is governed, collected, reviewed and produced. Whether a company is supporting its position in a regulatory exam, audit or legal matter, information governance and e-discovery need to be linked closely for the best outcome.