ediscovery and Search Challenges in the De-centralized Global Enterprise

ediscovery and Search Challenges in the De-centralized Global Enterprise

ediscovery and Search Challenges in the De-centralized Global Enterprise By John Patzakis 1 Summary: Large enterprises with information assets dispersed across many locations often suffer a critical information governance gap as traditional information management and ediscovery products fail to support such environments. This white paper outlines this critical problem, its legal compliance implications, and compelling solutions that both address this gap while reducing hard ediscovery costs and improving operational productivity. Many enterprises with data situated within a multitude of segmented networks across North America and the rest of the world face unique challenges for ediscovery and compliance-related investigation requirements, as well as for business-critical enterprise search and productivity. In particular, the wide area networks of project engineering, oil & gas, and government systems industries typically contain terabytes of geographically disparate information assets in often harsh operating environments with very limited network bandwidth. So how do these organizations access, preserve and review millions of critical documents in distributed global locations? Information management and ediscovery tools that require data centralization or run on expensive and inflexible hardware appliances cannot, by their very nature, address critical project information in places like Saudi Arabia, China, or Brazil. Network bandwidth constraints coupled with the requirement to migrate data to a single repository render traditional information management tools ineffective to address de-centralized global enterprise data. Additionally, the burdensome IT administration and user overhead, associated with the day-to-day use and operation of those systems, result in professional workers in the field resorting to their own makeshift and localized information management processes. These challenges are at the root of two critical and expensive pain points associated with the global de-centralized enterprise: 1. Very High ediscovery Costs As this data often must be accessed for compliance and litigation purposes, firms have little alternative but to spend millions to physically send expensive ediscovery consultants to those locations to perform manual and time consuming data collection and processing. 2. Poor Visibility into Key Information Assets With no effective means to search and review dispersed unmanaged data, firms suffer a significant loss of business productivity relating to global projects that are their most important sources of revenue. 2

Legal Data Preservation Requirements Despite the burdens associated with the electronic discovery of distributed data across the four corners of the earth, such data is considered accessible under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and thus must be preserved and collected if relevant to a legal matter. However, the good news is that the preservation and collection efforts can and should be targeted to only potentially relevant information, limited to only specific custodians and their associated sources with a demonstrated potential connection to the litigation matter in question. This is important as the biggest expense associated with ediscovery is the cost of overly inclusive preservation and collection. Properly targeted preservation initiatives are permitted by the courts and can be enabled by effective software that is able to quickly and effectively access and search these data sources throughout the enterprise. Business-Critical Search and Productivity Without an effective means to search and access high-value project-critical data, firms suffer immense costs. Project workflow productivity where information needs to be shared securely among multiple stakeholders greatly suffers. With data situated in asynchronous, remote locations in many countries with often poor satellite communication links, strategic projects often suffer delays and other disruptions due to the inability to expediently identify and access critical information. However, as stated, traditional information management and electronic discovery tools are not architected and not suited for this type of environment. As a result, companies are forced to have all of the site data copied en mass by either consultants who then charge a lot of money to sort through the data back in their labs, or by information management processes that must boil the ocean by slowly migrating distributed data to a central repository to be managed as an archive. Both of these approaches are very expensive, disruptive and unworkable in the long term. What is needed to address both ediscovery and enterprise search challenges for the de-centralized enterprise is a field-deployable search and ediscovery solution that operates in distributed and virtualized environments on-demand within these distributed global locations where the data resides. Automated Installation and Virtualization In order to meet such a challenge, the ediscovery and search solution must immediately and rapidly install, execute and efficiently operate in a localized, virtualized environment where the site data is located, 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. After installation, the solution must be able to index the documents and other data locally serve up those documents for remote but secure access, search and review through a web browser. As the heavy lifting (indexing, search, and document filtering) is all performed locally, this solution can effectively operate in some of the harshest local environments with limited network bandwidth. Such a process will enable corporations, law firms and consultants to quickly identify, search, and collect distributed data wherever it resides in the cloud or within the de-centralized enterprise, including globally remote locations, thereby greatly improving project efficiency and reducing ediscovery and compliance costs. 3

UseCase: Fortune 50 Energy Company Top global energy company facing unique challenges for the access and search of critical information assets distributed around the world. The company is faced with spending tens of millions of dollars to dramatically upgrade their network bandwidth in an attempt to address these critical limitations. Requirements Enterprise Search Localized on-demand search Easy work-flow to file shares and folders Minimize network cost & bandwidth limitations ediscovery Remote on-demand installation & operation Cost reduction through automation Defensible automated process for preservation Solution Houston-based IT was able to quickly install X1 Rapid DiscoveryTM server in the distributed locations. X1 Rapid Discovery was installed in their environment with standard issue hardware. Now, local professionals have the ability to search across more than 10,000,000 documents. What was once a difficult task, to view and search for CAD files and other documents over the spotty network, now saves tens of thousands of hours per year of lost productivity time on the company s most high-value projects. Additionally, the company was able to shelve their planned expensive network upgrade, saving tens of millions of dollars. X1 Rapid DiscoveryTM is a proven enterprise search and ediscovery solution that enables the access, search, and review of large volumes of distributed data wherever it resides in the global enterprise. X1 Rapid Discovery has a unique ability to rapidly deploy on demand to address large volumes of geographically disparate information assets. HQ X1 Rapid Discovery Field deployable enterprise search and ediscovery on-demand 4

Notes: 1 John Patzakis is an attorney and is President and CEO of X1 Discovery. He has published over 100 articles and white papers concerning digital evidence and the law, with a focus on authentication and discovery process. X1 offers next generation ediscovery and enterprise search solutions specifically designed for IT, electronic discovery and legal professionals. Built upon the market leading X1 search solution for business professionals, X1 delivers ediscovery that provides a platform for social media ediscovery and effectively supports investigations of cloud-based data. For more information, please contact info@x1.com X1 Discovery, Inc. 130 West Union Street, Pasadena, CA 91103 877-999-1347 tel 626-535-2701 fax 5 WP_RD_DC_142802