ediscovery and Search of Enterprise Data in the Cloud

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1 ediscovery and Search of Enterprise Data in the Cloud From Hype to Reality By John Patzakis & Eric Klotzko

2 ediscovery and Search of Enterprise Data in the Cloud: From Hype to Reality Despite the enormous cost benefits of the cloud, past concerns about the feasibility of ediscovery and general search across an organization s critical cloud-resident data prevented broader adoption. The absence of effective enterprise search and the inability to perform ediscovery on such data in-place without first exporting it en masse significantly negated many of the cloud s overall benefits. Central to the problem is the failure of ediscovery and enterprise search vendors to support the cloud with solutions that easily and remotely deploy and seamlessly operate in virtualized environments where the organization s data resides until now. This white paper examines the requirements of truly cloud-capable ediscovery software and benefits of breakthrough solutions that perform ediscovery as well as enterprise search of terabytes of cloud-based data where it resides and its implications for broader cloud adoption. ediscovery and Search Are Essential for Successful Enterprise Cloud Deployments This discussion focuses on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud deployments (such as the Amazon cloud or Rackspace). IaaS provides the means for organizations to aggressively store and virtualize their enterprise data and software, thus spawning the same large data volumes and requiring the same critical search and ediscovery requirements as traditional enterprise environments. IaaS enables organizations to deploy whatever data and supporting software they need into the cloud, including software to search, collect and perform early case assessment of all data in the IaaS cloud so long as that software is cloud-capable. However, the absence of ediscovery and enterprise search software that can be deployed, operated and leveraged to capture the extensive and elastic processing benefits of IaaS cloud deployments presents a barrier to broader cloud adoption. All of the potential advantages of the cloud should apply to ediscovery as well. The aggregation of electronically stored information into common online repositories provides the potential ability to cheaply search, collect and perform early case assessment in place without having to first export the data from the cloud and in a much faster and cheaper manner than land-based ediscovery efforts. However, despite much marketing hype, the architecture and design of nearly all of the leading ediscovery and enterprise search solutions are highly ill-suited for such cloud deployments. About X1 & LTech X1 offers a game-changing enterprise search and ediscovery solution allowing organizations to quickly search, identify, and act upon distributed data, whether it resides within the enterprise or within virtualized environments. X1 unifies search across all critical business data such as local s & files, webmail, network file shares, SharePoint sites, MS Exchange, PST files and Google docs. X1 s very unique and compelling ability to install and fully operate within virtualized environments, including the AWS cloud, enables organizations to address their globally distributed data in an efficient, expedient, defensible and highly cost-effective manner. For more information, please visit LTech was founded in 2001 to provide enterprises with best-ofbreed technology solutions. Since then, we have evolved into a leading cloud technology integrator. As an early Google Enterprise Partner, we have helped hundreds of customers benefit from Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance. Our experience working with a diverse set of Customers - from startups to Fortune 500 companies - has made us a trusted name in enterprise class technology services. For more information, please visit

3 Defining Cloud-Capable ediscovery and Enterprise Search Software Many enterprise software vendors claim to support the cloud, but are simply re-branding their existing offerings. Data hosting, especially where the vendor s manual labor is routinely required to upload and process data, does not meet defined cloud standards. Neither does a process that exports data through APIs or other means out of its resident cloud environment to slowly migrate the cloud data to the vendor tools, instead of deploying the tools (and their processing power) to the data where it resides in the cloud. In order to truly support IaaS cloud deployments, ediscovery and enterprise search software must meet the following three core requirements: 1 Automated Installation and Virtualization The ediscovery and search solution must immediately and rapidly install, execute and efficiently operate in a virtualized environment without rigid hardware requirements or on-site physical access. This is impossible if the solution is fused to hardware appliances or otherwise requires a complex on-site installation process. As hardware appliance solutions by definition are not cloud deployable and with enterprise search installations often requiring many months of on-premise man hours to install and configure, whether many of these vendors will be able to support robust IaaS cloud deployments in the reasonably foreseeable future is a significant question. Conversely, a truly virtualized solution within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud can be installed remotely and on-demand by launching an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) than contains the object code and installer of the application. 2 On-Demand Self-Service In its definition of cloud computing, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identifies on-demand self-service as an essential characteristic of the cloud where a consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider. Many hosted ediscovery services require shipping of data to the provider or extensive behind the scenes manual labor to load and configure the systems for data ingestion. Conversely, solutions that truly support cloud IaaS will spin up, ingest data and fully operate in an automated fashion without the need for manual on-premise labor for configuration or data import. 3 Rapid Elasticity NIST describes this characteristic as capabilities that scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time. This important benefit of cloud computing is accomplished by a parallelized software architecture designed to dynamically scale out over potentially several dozen virtualized servers to enable rapid ingestion, processing and analysis of data sets in that cloud environment. This capability would allow several terabytes of data to be indexed and processed within 2 to 4 hours on a highly automated basis at far less cost than non-cloud ediscovery efforts. However, many characteristics of leading ediscovery solutions fundamentality prevent their ability to support this core cloud requirement. Most ediscovery early case assessment solutions are developed and configured toward a monolithic processing schema designed to operate on a single expensive hardware apparatus. While recently spawning some bold marketing claims of high speeds and feeds, such architecture is very ill-suited to the cloud, which is powered by highly distributed processing across multitudes of servers. Additionally, many of the leading ediscovery and enterprise search solutions are tightly integrated with third party databases and other OEM technology that cannot be easily decoupled (and also present possible licensing constraints) making such elasticity physically and even legally impossible.

4 Breakthrough ediscovery and Enterprise Search Software for the Cloud X1 Rapid Discovery is a proven and now truly cloud-deployable ediscovery and enterprise search solution that enables corporations, law firms and consultants to quickly identify, search, and preserve distributed data in-place wherever it resides in the cloud or within the enterprise. With X1 Rapid Discovery, organizations can now quickly access, search, triage and preserve their data in their existing cloud environments, without having to first export that data, thereby transforming how organizations address the challenges of search, collection and analysis of cloud-based data. While other ediscovery products require migrating or even shipping your data to the vendor tools, X1 Rapid Discovery is a hardware independent software solution that uniquely installs and operates on-demand where your data currently resides. X1 Rapid Discovery provides these revolutionary capabilities due to its distinctive ability to install remotely in a matter of minutes without costly and rigid hardware requirements. Other ediscovery tools that are hardware appliance based or require days or even weeks of on-premise manual installation and configuration do not, by definition, truly support the cloud. X1 Rapid Discovery s easy to use web interface, federated search capabilities, matter centric work-flow, and high speed culling of up to terabytes of data transforms how legal and IT professionals conduct ediscovery and enterprise search in the cloud and throughout the enterprise. Case Study: ediscovery Case Study: Enterprise Search A Fortune 500 company maintains approximately 10 terabytes of enterprise data to file shares and SharePoint instances located in the Amazon Web Services (EC2) public cloud. In response to an urgent ediscovery preservation and collection requirement, the company launches X1 Rapid Discovery on demand within its instance of the AWS cloud where the data is located within minutes of the directive from legal. Using the scalable elasticity of the cloud, the 10 TB of data is then indexed within 24 hours and then in-house counsel and their staff are able, through a user friendly web interface, to perform iterative keyword searches and faceted filtering of the data to identify a small subset (2 GB of files) that are potentially relevant. The 2 gigabytes are then, with a few clicks, preserved in-place and made available for further attorney review. This entire exercise takes place in the company s instance of the cloud without exporting the data saving weeks of time and tens of thousands of dollars in ediscovery costs. A mid-sized pharmaceutical firm with a geographically disparate workforce locates 40 Terabytes of user files and archived pst s on file shares and SharePoint instances located in the Amazon Web Services (EC2) public cloud. The company also has a 15 TB cluster of similar data on premises on physical hardware and other 20GB cluster stored in their virtual data center. The company requires an effective and federated search capability of all three data clusters for over 1000 business professionals who need to search through and retrieve the data on a routine basis. The firm is able to easily install and operate X1 Rapid Discovery within their instance of the AWS cloud and the data is indexed in place providing excellent search and retrieval speeds. Additionally, separate instances of X1 Rapid Discovery are installed in the virtual data center as well as the on-premise cluster and the three index clusters are searched on a federated basis with excellent search and retrieval speeds with a rich user interface that includes a full fidelity preview pane.

5 Next steps for implementation: LTech as your premier cloud partner Why use LTech as your partner to implement X1 into your infrastructure? Simple: LTech provides a one stop shop cloud brokerage Our Valued Customers model that can help you implement any of your needs from X1 to AWS. LTech has the expertise needed to help you with any system you are currently working with to get you up and running the right way without hassle. LTech is focused on software engineering and cloud enablement for mid-market and enterprise customers. An AWS consulting partner since 2009, LTech strives to make sure our projects are completed on-time, on-budget, and with success for every party involved. As an AWS consulting partner, LTech provides infrastructure assessment and strategy formulation. LTech, in combination with AWS and X1, will work with your organization's regulatory compliance requirements and create a roadmap for development for migration of development, QA, production and other environments such as Disaster Recovery related to AWS. LTech and X1 together are problem solvers for your organization. With a simple and quick UI for your end users, rapid install on EC2 machines adjacent to your data and the ability to scale across multiple EC2 instances, X1 is a great solution for your organization. Let LTech's expertise in the business help you implement these products. Please contact LTech at x1@ltech.com for our exclusive Search Assessment Pilot Package. Let us assist you in understanding the most cost effective strategy while testing X1 s capabilities. For more information visit x1.com, ltech.com or follow our social media sites: twitter.com/ltech and twitter.com/x1discovery. Our Accreditations