EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model)

Information archiving is the practice of capturing, indexing, and preserving an organization's communications and electronic records in a secure, searchable, tamper-evident repository so they can be retained, retrieved, and produced for compliance, governance, and discovery.

Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) is the software category covering products that capture and retain email, files, and collaboration and messaging data at organization scale for regulatory compliance, eDiscovery, and records management. EIA platforms typically add supervision, retention management, and search on top of a central archive.

Electronic discovery (eDiscovery) is the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, searching, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) as evidence in litigation, investigations, or regulatory matters. Modern eDiscovery runs directly against an archive to cut the time and cost of responding to legal requests.

Email archiving is the automated capture and long-term preservation of inbound, outbound, and internal email in a separate, immutable store — independent of the mail server — so messages remain complete, unaltered, and searchable for retention and discovery.

Data archiving moves information that is no longer in active use into long-term, lower-cost, policy-governed storage where it stays retrievable. Unlike a backup (a short-term copy for disaster recovery), an archive is the system of record retained to satisfy compliance and discovery obligations.

Early case assessment (ECA) is the practice of analyzing a potential matter's data early — its volume, key custodians, date ranges, and themes — to estimate risk, cost, and strategy before committing to full review. Running ECA against an archive helps cull irrelevant data and narrow scope.