Tag Archives: Enterprise eDiscovery

February 25, 2025 · 9:34 AM

True Index-in-Place Capability for Global Enterprise eDiscovery and Information Governance Only Possible with Distributed Micro-Indexing Architecture

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

As legal and compliance teams grapple with exponential data growth, the need for faster, more efficient eDiscovery has never been greater. One key trend emerging from the 2025 State of Industry Report by eDiscovery Today is the growing demand for in-place indexing, with 15.5% of respondents citing it as a critical priority. But achieving true ‘index-in-place’ without bulk data transfers or excessive infrastructure costs—requires a fundamentally different architecture: distributed micro-indexing.

Unlike traditional eDiscovery tools that rely on centralized crawling and bulk data transfers, X1 Enterprise’s distributed micro-indexing architecture allows organizations to search, analyze, and collect data directly at the source—without moving vast amounts of information to a separate processing environment. This means faster insights, lower costs, and reduced security risks.

However, with this capability being highly valued, many vendors have parroted this messaging but have offerings that do not qualify as true index-in-place. Unlike traditional enterprise search or eDiscovery platforms that rely on centralized indexing (e.g., crawling, copying, and transferring all the data into a single repository), X1’s micro-indexing distributes the workload. It creates small, efficient indexes at the data source—whether a user’s laptop, email server, or a cloud source such as Microsoft 365 —and unifies search results on-demand. Transferring data in bulk to a central appliance or server farm via a crawling agent or Robocopy function does not qualify. A true index-in-place using distributed micro-indexes uniquely enables scalability, targeted collection and minimizes security and data governance risks in eDiscovery and information governance matters.

Earlier this year, a Fortune 500 company faced a massive eDiscovery and GDPR compliance challenge: indexing and searching over 70 terabytes of data across Microsoft 365 and on-premises sources—all without disrupting operations. With X1 Enterprise, they accomplished this in just a few weeks—a feat impossible with traditional solutions that rely on slow, centralized processing.

X1’s unique approach is based upon distributed, micro-indexing search and collection capabilities. Below are the top ten benefits of this architecture tailored to eDiscovery and enterprise data governance and how it differs from alternative approaches.

  1. Rapid, In-Place Data Identification: Legal teams can locate relevant documents across endpoints, cloud sources, and network drives instantly—without waiting for slow, centralized crawls. X1’s micro-indexing creates lightweight, decentralized indexes at the endpoint level (e.g., individual laptops, servers, or cloud accounts).
  2. Real-Time Search Across Distributed Systems: Execute complex, Boolean-rich searches across terabytes of data in Microsoft 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, and beyond. X1 enables real-time, federated searches across up to hundreds of terabytes of multiple data sources (e.g., Microsoft 365, local drives, email archives) from a single interface, leveraging micro-indexes updated at the source.
  3. Minimized Over-Collection Risks: X1’s Micro-indexing allows precise targeting of relevant data, minimizing the need to collect entire datasets for review. X1’s granular indexing supports instantaneous keyword searches and metadata filtering at the source.
  4. Lower eDiscovery Costs: By eliminating the need to transfer and reprocess massive datasets, X1 slashes infrastructure and vendor fees. By indexing and searching data in-place (without moving it to a central repository), X1 nearly eliminates reliance on third-party processing tools and expensive manual services, with dramatically reduced time to review.
  5. Optimized M365 eDiscovery Support: Avoids Microsoft Purview throttling, supports modern attachments, and enables cost-effective, high-speed data access. Each custodian is assigned an individual micro-index which enables X1 to achieve unmatched throughput, support modern attachments without premium licensing, address inactive mailboxes and more.
  6. Massive Scalability: X1’s micro-indexing distributes the workload on a parallelized basis, allowing the index and searching of hundreds of terabytes of data in-place at speeds not seen before in the enterprise eDiscovery and information governance industry. Micro-indexes are updated incrementally and in real-time as new data comes in, rather than requiring batch copying and re-indexing of an entire corpus.
  7. Support for Remote and Hybrid Workforces: X1’s endpoint indexing works seamlessly on distributed devices, ensuring data from remote employees or cloud platforms is readily accessible without requiring physical access.
  8. Proactive Compliance & Risk Monitoring: Instantly identify PII, unencrypted sensitive files, and policy violations across the enterprise. With micro-indexes updated in real-time, X1 allows organizations to monitor for policy violations (e.g., PII exposure, unencrypted sensitive files) across endpoints, fileshares and M365 accounts instantly.
  9. In-Place Remediation and Governance: As the data remains in place, remediation is effectively and accurately applied at scale. This contrasts to other “copy and move” processes that are merely working off-site with copies of your data, rendering effective remediation efforts extremely costly and burdensome, if not impossible.
  10. Data Minimization and GDPR Compliance: X1’s capabilities directly map to the GDPR’s proportionality and data minimization requirements. In contrast, tools that require full disc imaging or bulk copy and transfer for basic eDiscovery collection are extremely problematic.

Conclusion
For legal, compliance, and IT teams struggling with slow, expensive, and inefficient eDiscovery workflows, distributed micro-indexing is the future. X1 Enterprise’s unique in-place search ensures rapid results, reduced costs, and ironclad compliance—without moving or duplicating sensitive data. If your organization relies on Microsoft 365, remote workforces, or high-volume data environments, X1 provides the speed, scalability, and security you need.

Ready to Learn More?
Discover how X1 Enterprise can revolutionize your eDiscovery and compliance strategy. Schedule a demo today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Study, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Information Governance, Preservation & Collection

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January 15, 2014 · 8:22 AM

eDiscovery Software Industry Faces Transition

changes aheadRecently, the eDiscovery and litigation support field has seen many developments reflecting a significant shift in the eDiscovery software industry. Greg Buckles and Barry Murphy of The eDiscovery Journal report in several articles and notes in the past few weeks that they see a palpable transition away from software back towards services by corporations seeking to address their eDiscovery requirements. So not surprisingly, there had been various reports indicating reductions in force at several of the top eDiscovery software providers.

Not to pick on Guidance Software, my former company, but they are publically traded and recently disclosed their aggressive cost-cutting measures. In their PowerPoint presentation, Guidance states that the eDiscovery software field “is maturing…not as many large deals available there” resulting in a strategy for the company to refocus on core computer forensics and computer security, and to pivot toward profitability over topline revenue growth. And I don’t think what Guidance is experiencing is much different than from what many other eDiscovery software firms in the space are going through.

And neither does industry analyst Barry Murphy. “Based on what I see, KCura with their Relativity product is doing well, and I think there has been some good growth in the mobile forensics space, and X1 has done well with X1 Social Discovery in terms of growth and customer acquisition. Other than that, it seems that the remaining eDiscovery software companies are either contracting or experiencing only very modest growth.”

Part of the problem is that many aggressive enterprise eDiscovery deployments never achieve their promise of global scalability. A little over a year ago, the CEO of another eDiscovery and forensics software firm publicly claimed that enterprise-wide Autonomy implementations for eDiscovery, in his opinion, never really worked that well from what he could see. Without commenting on or taking a position on the accuracy of that assertion, the article does reflect broader frustrations I have heard from IT and in-house counsel about eDiscovery software in general that claims to be an end-to-end solution for aggressive and enterprise-wide deployments. As a result, many corporate legal departments and corporate IT have opted to continue to outsource eDiscovery to service providers over attempting to implement enterprise-wide solutions.

On the other hand, and reflective of this trend, services firms in this space are apparently doing quite well and their numbers are growing. There are clearly hundreds, if not over a thousand consulting firms, in North America providing eDiscovery consulting services. In just one metric, two years since we launched X1 Social Discovery, nearly 200 eDiscovery and computer forensics firms have become paying customers, and many more are currently evaluating. Some firms have a single license of X1, many have multiple, even dozens. I think those figures reflect both the number of service providers in this space and the aggressive spending behavior from the providers.

I also think, and of course being biased, that with X1 Social Discovery gaining over 400 paid install sites in just two years since the launch of the product, with 250 percent increase in annual sales in 2013, is quite an accomplishment especially given the status of this market. I think that reflects both the quality of X1 Social Discovery as well as the compelling use case of the collection and preservation of social media data for discovery and investigative purposes. So I want to take this opportunity to thank our customers for making 2013 a great year for us and driving the further development and enhancements of our products.

I’m looking forward very much to Legal Tech New York this year, both to meet with our customers old and new, and to speak with some fellow executives about how they are adapting to the changes in the eDiscovery market and opportunities in 2014. I hope to see you there!

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Filed under eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Social Media Investigations

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April 17, 2012 · 10:53 AM

X1 Rapid Discovery: First Enterprise eDiscovery Solution Supporting IaaS Cloud

Today I am pleased to announce our launch of  X1 Rapid Discovery, version 4. X1RD is a proven and now truly cloud-deployable eDiscovery and enterprise search solution enabling our customers to quickly identify, search, and collect distributed data wherever it resides in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud or within the enterprise. X1RD is a sister product to our acclaimed X1 Social Discovery, which we launched last year. Version 3 of X1 Rapid Discovery is a proven early case assessment and enterprise search application, but is now IaaS cloud deployable and features a new interface.

I know what you may be thinking — another eDiscovery CEO re-branding the company’s software as cloud. But hear me out on this. Sure, X1RD can serve as a hosted SaaS solution like many other tools (SaaS hosting has been around for over a decade), but the big news here is that X1RD is now deployable anywhere, anytime in the IaaS cloud within minutes. X1RD also features the ability to leverage the parallel processing power of the cloud to scale up and scale down as needed. In fact, X1RD is the first pure eDiscovery solution (not including a hosted email archive tool) to meet the technical requirements and be accepted into the Amazon AWS ISV program.

So what does this mean? Allow me to illustrate these ground-breaking capabilities through the following two growingly common scenarios faced by organizations today:

Scenario 1: A F1000 company maintains 2 terabytes of data up in the Amazon EC2 or S3 (storage) cloud and suddenly must find the comparatively small amount of relevant data within those 2TB as quickly as possible to respond to a critical investigation requirement. There is no time to spend several weeks downloading the entire 2TB out of the cloud through the thin pipe or waiting for Amazon personnel to copy the entire data set to hard drives and ship it back. What is urgently needed is the ability to quickly install eDiscovery software to index, search and review that data in the very IaaS cloud environment where it exists. That way only the small data set (say 10 gigabytes) of relevant data is identified and then finally exported. That is what X1 Rapid Discovery delivers.

Scenario 2: The same investigation sends the company’s eDiscovery consultant overseas to collect data at a subsidiary site. Upon the collection of the first 200 gigabytes, the attorneys insist  that the data must be quickly indexed for detailed, iterative searching in order to better inform the remaining on-site collection effort. However, the collection team left their large ECA appliance they normally use at home as it doesn’t travel well nor would it pass foreign customs. However, in this case there are several options with X1RD. If an eDiscovery software solution is truly a cloud-capable solution, then it can quickly install anywhere, including the IaaS cloud or on available hardware on-site. So the team can either locate available hardware resources with Windows OS or upload the data to a private or public IaaS cloud environment and operate a virtual eDiscovery lab with X1RD.

X1RD can just as easily be installed behind the firewall as in the cloud, but right now, all of our demos and proof of concepts are being performed in the IaaS cloud. But don’t just take our word for it, we would be happy to demonstrate this for you by remotely installing in your public or private IaaS cloud environment and collecting, indexing and searching your data. We are up for the challenge!

> Register for our live webinar on May 2 to see a demo of X1 Rapid Discovery and to hear from eDiscovery expert, Barry Murphy, on his view of the current eDiscovery market, with respect to the cloud.

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Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, IaaS

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