Tag Archives: information governance

August 27, 2024 · 10:36 AM

Addressing Critical Information Governance Challenges from Departing Employees

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

When employees leave an organization, they often leave behind a significant amount of valuable information. This poses major information governance challenges, as companies must decide how to manage litigation holds and retain essential data assets.

A common response to this challenge is to retain departed employees’ laptops, hard drives, or keep their Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace accounts active. However, this approach is both expensive and inefficient. Another often-used method is creating a full disk image of the laptop for archiving. While this preserves data, it is a slow and cumbersome process that can require vast amounts of storage, sometimes reaching petabytes, which becomes both costly and unwieldy. Neither approach offers the ability to gain insights from the data, nor do they allow for intelligent and targeted data extraction, making it difficult to leverage these data assets effectively or comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

To address these challenges, X1 has developed a game-changing workflow utilizing our X1 Enterprise Platform, offering a streamlined and cost-effective solution. With our platform, organizations can process hundreds of laptops and Microsoft 365 accounts in a single day. Leveraging X1’s unique and patented in-place indexing technology, data extraction becomes highly targeted, allowing for efficient responses to litigation holds. This means that each litigation scenario can have a tailored search applied across all relevant data sources simultaneously, enabling precise data extraction.

For example, one company with over two dozen active litigation holds has employed X1’s solution, allowing them to save detailed keyword search routines crafted by their counsel. These searches can be quickly and programmatically applied not only to data on specific laptops but also to archived PSTs and associated Microsoft 365 accounts. Once the targeted data is extracted, the company repurposes the laptops for new employees, resulting in significant cost savings—estimated to be in the millions—and a reduction in storage requirements.

Beyond managing litigation holds, another core benefit of X1’s solution is its ability to extract key data assets from departed employees to retain within the company’s knowledge base. This capability is especially valuable for law firms, consulting firms, and organizations that rely heavily on high-end knowledge professionals. For instance, one law firm uses X1’s workflow to rapidly search large, archived PST files from departed attorneys to identify and separate key data related to ongoing matters. This ensures that crucial information remains accessible to the firm or is appropriately transferred to the attorney’s new firm. Additionally, vital legal and business insights from retained documents and emails are quickly mined and reviewed, enhancing the firm’s overall knowledge management.

Client Example:
• Overview: A major pharmaceutical retailer uses X1 within Relativity to perform 50 data collections weekly, covering both Mac and PC environments. The system allows them to repurpose laptops from departed employees within days instead of months, leading to substantial savings.
• Integration: The company eliminated the need for traditional eDiscovery tools to remediate laptops, opting instead for X1’s more efficient approach.
• Time and Cost Savings: This shift has saved the company millions by:
1. Reducing the reliance on costly traditional eDiscovery tools.
2. Minimizing the risk and cost associated with retaining unnecessary data.
3. Reintroducing millions of dollars’ worth of computer equipment back into circulation.
4. Completing these processes in one-tenth the time it would have traditionally taken, vastly improving operational efficiency.

Conclusion:
In today’s fast-paced and data-driven world, organizations face numerous challenges when it comes to managing and retaining data from departed employees. Traditional methods, such as retaining physical devices or creating full disk images, are not only costly and time-consuming but also fail to provide the flexibility and insight needed to effectively manage information assets. X1’s innovative solutions, particularly its patented in-place indexing technology, offer a modern, scalable, and efficient alternative. By enabling targeted data extraction, streamlining the process for litigation holds, and supporting knowledge retention, X1 empowers organizations to manage data governance with precision and agility.

For companies navigating complex data environments, especially those utilizing BYOD policies, X1 Enterprise Platform ensures compliance while protecting privacy. By implementing X1’s advanced platform, organizations can not only reduce costs and save valuable time but also gain a strategic advantage in managing their information governance needs. We invite you to explore how X1 can transform your data management processes and help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

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May 21, 2024 · 12:12 PM

Microsoft 365 eDiscovery Throttling is Structural and Won’t Be Going Away

By Chas Meier

Users of Microsoft 365 for eDiscovery and Information Governance continue to encounter significant problems with low throughput and defensibility. Many customers report to us that Purview eDiscovery Premium’s documented limitations, including a 2GB per hour indexing limit, prevent them from using the platform to handle anything other than small matters. A routine eDiscovery matter involving one hundred custodians each with about 10GB of M365 data typically requires several weeks to complete with MS Purview Premium. This is a non-starter for legal teams who are up against pressing litigation timelines.

It is important to understand that because M365 is built on a large-scale multi-tenancy SaaS architecture, such challenges are a feature, not a bug of the system. Multi-tenancy is an architecture where shared computing resources are apportioned across large numbers of users. This architecture enables Microsoft to provide the service at a lower cost since computing services are shared.

However, multi-tenant architecture enables scale (in terms of multitudes of users) and efficiency through uniformity. These architectures are not designed for outlier workloads like eDiscovery that routinely require intensive surges in computing resources to collect, process and search terabytes of data. In fact, multi-tenancy cloud architects would identify eDiscovery workloads as a “noisy neighbor” that threatens the overall performance and user experience of the system, and thus must be managed through quality-of-service mechanisms like throttling and time-outs.

I think of multi-tenant architectures like the business model utilized by a gym. The gym has more and better equipment than I have at home, which is attractive so many will join through a membership. The gym has a fixed amount of square footage and equipment which is more than any individual needs and is sufficient to support those that show up, occasionally having to coordinate access to the equipment but manageable. However, what if a small group showed up at the gym every day for most of the day and hogged the equipment? What if more people showed up, became frustrated, and dissatisfied? Gym management would be forced to act to ensure fair access to the equipment.

Throughout my career as an eDiscovery service provider, we made large investments in infrastructure and capacity to the point of overkill to equip ourselves to service a client’s need to address high volumes of data in short timelines without impacting their business-as-usual activities. We were like the fire department for big unstructured data needs.

A huge differentiator in X1’s approach is to divide and conquer large scale projects by leveraging the cumulative power of a decentralized computing orchestrated through a unified management, search, and collection console. Think of this like deploying a fire suppression system proactively before the fire.

Last year, X1 introduced M365 data connectors into our X1 Enterprise platform to satisfy a critical need for enterprises to conduct cost-efficient yet highly scalable eDiscovery search and collection of M365 data. The response has been tremendous, with X1 seeing record demand in large part, due to the architectural limitations and deficiencies noted above.

X1 Enterprise Collect provides users the unique ability to index and search M365 data in-place and then collect in a targeted and iterative manner. This at speeds and throughput far exceeding other tools, including Microsoft Purview Premium. X1 achieves such scalability through a decentralized custodian-based approach that does not rely on the M365 or Purview search Index, which has known issues with the number of file types supported, consistency of search results, and throughput. X1’s approach enables a very scalable, defensible, and robust data collection at speeds far exceeding that of M365 Purview and other approaches.

For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Collect Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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May 7, 2024 · 9:28 AM

Index and Search In-Place Workflows Are Essential for Information Governance

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

Information Governance

Accurate pre-collection data insight is a game-changing capability that enables organizations and their legal teams to determine the scope, volume, and content of electronic information before the very disruptive and expensive step of collecting the data. This insight is enabled through distributed index and search in-place technology.

A true distributed index and search in-place capability for unstructured data requires a software-based indexing technology be deployed directly onto fileservers, laptops, or in the cloud to address Microsoft 365 and other cloud-based data sources. This indexing occurs where the data sources reside without requiring a bulk transfer of the data to a central location. Once indexed, searches can be performed in seconds, supporting complex Boolean operators, metadata filters and regular expressions. Searches can be iterated and refined without limitation, which is critical for large data sets.

While our previous blog post addressed the critical importance of this capability in eDiscovery matters, it is equally essential in information governance projects such as PII audits, the purging of redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data, and due diligence and data separation efforts in support of corporate mergers and acquisitions. Many X1 customers have recently employed our indexing in-place technology on such projects with remarkable success.

Incredibly, many of these customers also received alternative proposals that leverage traditional eDiscovery workflows presenting much higher estimated costs and much longer durations. Traditional eDiscovery workflows mandate broad and manual data collection, copying and migration efforts, large scale data processing, and loading the data into a different platform for review and analysis. There are three fundamental reasons why this “traditional approach” is fatally flawed for information governance projects.

  1. Prohibitive Cost and Risk. The data scope of information governance projects involves terabytes and sometimes petabytes of data. Mass collection, copying and migration of these data sets with manual hand-offs for later analysis in a centralized location is extremely expensive, disruptive, and time consuming. Also, mass duplication and egress of enterprise data under control to execute ROT, PII, data separation or other due diligence projects is completely antithetical to their very purpose.
  2. The “Now What?” Problem. Let’s assume an organization has decided to incur the enormous cost, disruption and risk associated with the mass copying, migration, and centralization of unstructured data, and after loading the data into a review process, a key subset of documents and emails are finally identified for purging or other remedial action. Now what? You are merely working with copies! The live “original” emails and documents are in M365, email accounts, file servers or on laptops. It is possible to manually retrace and remediate, but that process is expensive and disruptive.
  3. Instant Staleness. Finally, a mass copying and migration effort often requiring several weeks to complete, is immediately stale once eventually completed as the live data in its original location has inevitably changed.

X1 solves these challenges though our proprietary and patented distributed index and search in-place technology that enables scale by bringing true distributed indexing in-place to laptops, file shares, M365 and other cloud sources. X1 Enterprise Collect significantly streamlines information governance workflows by identifying and allowing for the remediation of targeted data in-place, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome data duplication and migration.

For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Collect Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/x1-enterprise-collect-platform.

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Filed under Cloud Data, compliance, Corporations, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Information Governance, law firm, Preservation & Collection

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August 21, 2018 · 9:27 AM

When your “Compliance” and eDiscovery Processes Violate the GDPR

Time to reevaluate tools that rely on systemic data duplication

The European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became effective in May 2018. To briefly review, the GDPR applies to the processing of “personal data” of EU citizens and residents (a.k.a. “data subjects”).” Personal data” is broadly defined to include “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.” That could include email addresses and transactional business communications that are tied to a unique individual. GDPR is applicable to any organization that provides goods and services to individuals located in the EU on a regular enough basis, or maintains electronic records of their employees who are EU residents.

In additional to an overall framework of updated privacy policies and procedures, GDPR requires the ability to demonstrate and prove that personal data is being protected. Essential components for such compliance are data audit and discovery capabilities that allow companies to efficiently search and identify the information necessary, both proactively, and also reactively to respond to regulators and EU private citizen’s requests. As such, any GDPR compliance programs are ultimately hollow without consistent, operational execution and enforcement through an effective eDiscovery information governance platform.

However, some content management and archiving tool providers are repurposing their messaging with GDPR compliance. For example, an industry executive contact recently recounted a meeting with such a vendor, where their tool involved duplicating all of the emails and documents in the enterprise and then migrating all those copies to a central server cluster. That way, the tool could theoretically manage all the documents and emails centrally. Putting aside the difficulty of scaling up that process to manage and sync hundreds of terabytes of data in a medium-sized company (and petabytes in a Fortune 500), this anecdote underscores a fundamental flaw in tools that require systemic data duplication in order to search and manage content.

Under the GDPR, data needs to be minimized, not systematically duplicated en masse. It would be extremely difficult under such an architecture to sync up and remediate non-compliant documents and emails back at the original location. So at the end the day, this proposed solution would actually violate the GDPR by making duplicate copies of data sets that would inevitably include non-compliant information, without any real means to sync up remediation.Desktop_virtualization

The same is true for the much of the traditional eDiscovery workflows, which require numerous steps involving data duplication at every turn. For instance, data collection is often accomplished through misapplied forensic tools that operate by a broadly collecting copies through over collection. As the court said in In re Ford Motor Company, 345 F.3d 1315 (11th Cir. 2003): “[E]xamination of a hard drive inevitably results in the production of massive amounts of irrelevant, and perhaps privileged, information…” Even worse, the collected data is then re-duplicated one or often two more times by the examiner for archival purposes. And then the data is sent downstream for processing, which results in even more data duplication. Load files are created for further transfers, which are also duplicated.

Chad Jones of D4 explains on a recent webinar and in his follow-on blog post about how such manual and inefficient handoffs throughout the discovery process greatly increase risk as well as cost. Like antiquated factories spewing tons of pollution, outdated eDiscovery processes spin out a lot of superfluous data duplication. Much of that data likely contains non-compliant information, thus “polluting” your organization, including through your eDiscovery services vendors, with increased GDPR and other regulatory risk.

In light of the above, when evaluating your compliance and eDiscovery software, organizations should keep in mind these five key requirements to keep in line with GDPR and good overall information governance:

  1. Search data in place. Data on laptops and file servers need to be in searched in place. Tools that require copy and migration to central locations to search and manage are part of the problem, not the solution.
  1. Delete Data in Place. GDPR requires that non-compliance data be deleted on demand. Purging data on managed archives does not suffice if other copies are on laptops, unmanaged servers and other unstructured sources. Your search in place solution should also delete in place.
  1. Data Minimization. GDPR requires that organizations minimize data as opposed to exploding data through mass duplication.
  1. Targeted and Efficient Data Collection: Only potentially relevant data should be collected for eDiscovery and data audits. Over-collection leads to much greater cost and risk.
  1. Seamless integration with attorney review platforms, to bypass the processing steps which requires manual handoffs and load files.

X1 Data Audit & Compliance is a ground-breaking platform that meets these criterion while enabling system-wide data discovery supporting GDPR and many other information governance requirements.   Please visit here to learn more.

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February 22, 2017 · 9:01 AM

Declining Law Firm Productivity Tied to Information Governance Challenges

A new legal industry study finds a substantial decline in attorney productivity in recent years, significantly reducing law firm profitability. In its 2017 Report on the State of the Legal Market, Thomson Reuters notes that “over the past 10 years, the average billable hours worked by all lawyers across the market declined from 134 billable hours per month in 2007 to 122 through the late part of 2016.” This equals a reduction of 144 billable hours per year per lawyer. The report, by multiplying that total by the average worked rate ($463) for all lawyers in 2016, determined the productivity decline is costing law firms about $66,672 per lawyer per year.

One of the main causes for diminished lawyer productivity is the exponential proliferation of their stored emails and documents and the associated inability to recall important work product and previous e-mail communications. Another industry study assessing the productivity of lawyers and other high-end information knowledge workers found that such professionals on average spend 11.2 hours a week dealing with challenges related to document creation and management. As the table below from the IDC report demonstrates, lawyers and paralegals lose as much as 2.3 hours a week searching, but not finding, the right documents and emails and another 2 hours recreating documents they failed to locate.

Time Spent on Document Management Challenges

productivity-for-law-firms-table2Source: IDC’s Information Worker Survey, June 2012

Applying the same lawyer cost calculations used by Thomson Reuters in their 2017 report (4.3 hours per week X $463 average hourly rate X 49 annual worked weeks) reveals that an effective search capability can dramatically improve law firm productivity by as much as $97,500 annually per lawyer. Even normalizing this analysis for recovered billable time (assuming every hour of gained productivity results in less than a full hour of actual billable time) a law firm of a 1000 attorneys would realize tens of millions per year in recovered billable hours, in addition to important intangible benefits including enhanced work product, improved client satisfaction and attorney morale.

Many law firm attorneys tell us that without the right search solution, they can spend hours looking for a past proposal, a key client communication from several months prior, or many other forms of work product and client communications that are stored in emails, local drives or cloud file shares. If lawyers and paralegals cannot quickly find such information assets, then that represents a serious information governance failure. Time wasted rummaging around for past emails and documents is not billable time and directly cuts into a firms’ profit margin. To be sure, a law firm’s two most important assets are its professionals and their body of work product and other key information. As such, a top priority for law firm management should be to ensure their attorneys have the right productivity search solution to quickly find and retrieve the firms’ information assets.

However, the recurring theme we hear is that outside of the data managed by X1, enterprise search is a source of major frustration for law firms and other organizations. This is confirmed by survey after survey where the vast majority of respondents report dissatisfaction with their current enterprise search platform. Simply put, the traditional approach to enterprise search has not worked. This is largely because most search solutions deployed in recent years focused on IT requirements — which see search as either a technical project or a commodity — rather than an intimate end-user driven requirement that is core to their professional productivity.

And for lawyers especially, “good enough” is not good enough when it comes to their search. It does not make sense to invest in an enterprise search solution for business productivity search, unless there is a significant improvement in the end-users search experience for emails, files and SharePoint data.

At X1, however, many of our customers report dramatic improvements with their productivity search, with firm-wide X1 rollouts being major wins at their organization. We believe that X1’s unique focus on the end-user is the key. You won’t find many other business productivity search solutions where the end users drive demand, instead of the tool being imposed on the end-users by IT or systems integrators. We continually hear countless testimonials from business professionals, at law firms and companies large and small, who swear by their X1 and cannot imagine working without it. In speaking with industry analysts and other experts in the enterprise search field, this is an almost unheard of phenomenon, where end-user satisfaction with the companies’ enterprise search platform is usually around 10-15 percent, verses the 80-85 percent satisfaction ratio we see with X1.

Importantly, X1 is a platform. Users need a single-pane-of-glass view to all of their information – email, files, SharePoint, archives like Veritas Enterprise Vault, OneDrive, Box and other network and cloud sources.  X1 Search provides a user-friendly interface to all information that lets attorneys find what they are looking for in an instant.  But the thousands of X1 end users know all this. The key takeaway for CIOs and other IT executives is that search is an inherently personal user experience, and the number one requirement, by far, for a successful search initiative is enthusiastic end-user adoption. If the lawyers and other business professionals in your organization are not passionately embracing the search solution, then nothing else matters.

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