Tag Archives: m365

August 5, 2025 · 9:57 AM

Why Most eDiscovery Tools and Online Archiving Offerings Are Terrible for Information Governance

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

Many organizations assume that information governance initiatives—such as data privacy audits, purging ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial) data, merger and acquisition-driven data separation, or data breach impact assessments—can be effectively addressed using eDiscovery tools or online archiving platforms. After all, eDiscovery solutions excel at identifying and searching through large volumes of unstructured data in high-stakes, reactive legal scenarios.

However, there is a critical distinction between eDiscovery and information governance workflows that organizations must understand when selecting the right solution. eDiscovery typically involves copying large volumes of data at multiple stages and continually moving that data upstream, eventually into third-party cloud platforms for processing and hosting. In contrast, duplicating and moving massive data sets is often the last thing you want to do in information governance projects, which are typically large-scale, enterprise-wide initiatives.

In fact, here are five major reasons why most eDiscovery tools and online archiving solutions are terrible for information governance. These tools:

  1. Dramatically Increase Risk
    Consider a scenario where an organization suffers a data breach and must assess 100 terabytes of data to identify compromised PII and determine reporting obligations. Most eDiscovery tools require a full copy of this data to be made and uploaded into a third-party environment—doubling the volume of sensitive material and compounding the risk. Instead of helping, this kind of mass data duplication exacerbates the compliance and privacy risks that governance initiatives aim to reduce. In fact, such inefficient data duplication directly conflicts with GDPR principles, which require data minimalization and proportionality.
  2. Are Exorbitantly Expensive
    Information governance is not a small, tactical effort—it is a broad, enterprise-wide initiative. At X1, we rarely see governance projects involving less than 50 terabytes of data. Using traditional eDiscovery pricing models, even with volume-based discounts, these projects can quickly rack up tens of millions of dollars in costs due to unnecessary processing, storage, and hosting workflows designed for litigation—not governance.
  3. Can’t Meet Time Constraints
    Copying, transferring, uploading, and indexing 100 terabytes of data into a third-party cloud platform can easily take six months or more, even in an ideal scenario. That timeline is incompatible with the urgent nature of most information governance use cases, such as data breach impact assessments or M&A-related audits. Worse yet, by the time the data has been copied and indexed, it will likely already be stale—undermining the integrity of the project from the outset.
  4. Create Remediation Roadblocks
    Suppose you incur the costs and risk to copy and upload a full data set in an external review platform and successfully identify sensitive or outdated data for remediation. Now what? You are merely working with copies of the data. The originals remain distributed across Microsoft 365, file servers, laptops, and other locations. Trying to trace back and manually remediate live data sources is costly, disruptive, and error-prone—defeating the very efficiency goals of the governance project.
  5. Do not Support Microsoft 365 Effectively
    Many so-called “governance” tools are simply rebranded email archiving systems that rely on bulk copying data out of Microsoft 365. Not only is this approach expensive and inefficient, but it also creates serious technical and compliance risks. Microsoft 365 does not support mass data exports at scale without significant friction, and errors are common—as illustrated in FTC v. Match Group, No. 3:19-CV-2281-K, 2025 WL 46024 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 7, 2025). In that case, Microsoft Purview exports into an archival system failed, resulting in court-imposed discovery sanctions. If a solution does not support index-in-place capabilities—allowing analysis directly upon the native data—it is simply not viable for modern information governance needs.

A Different Approach is Required
Information governance requires agility, precision, and a fundamentally different approach than traditional eDiscovery processes. Organizations must be wary of legacy eDiscovery tools and outdated archiving platforms masquerading as governance solutions.

X1 Enterprise was purpose-built to address the challenges and inefficiencies that plague traditional eDiscovery tools and archiving platforms when applied to information governance. At the core of the X1 Enterprise Platform is its patented micro-indexing architecture, which enables organizations to search, analyze, and act on data in place, without needing to first copy, move, or centralize it.

This index-in-place capability means X1 can connect directly to endpoints, file shares, Microsoft 365, and other enterprise data sources to perform fast, scalable, and highly targeted data sweeps and analysis—without duplicating the data or exposing it to unnecessary risk. Whether you are performing a data privacy audit, a breach impact assessment, or an M&A data separation project, you can run real-time searches across tens of terabytes and thousands of custodians—with results returned in minutes, not months, and the data remediation performed in-place.

By eliminating the need for data movement, X1 avoids the five major pitfalls of legacy tools:
• Risk: No mass duplication of data, reducing exposure and aligning with GDPR and other regulatory requirements.
• Cost: No massive ingestion or hosting fees—X1 dramatically lowers total project costs by working directly with live data.
• Time: Deploy and execute governance initiatives in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods.
• Remediation: Act directly on live data—flag it, move it, delete it, or apply tags—in the original source locations.
• Microsoft 365 Compatibility: X1 integrates natively with Microsoft 365 and other systems without requiring cumbersome exports or expensive additional licensing and services, enabling robust, reliable governance at enterprise scale. Simply put, we believe X1 provides the best available support for M365 data sources.

In short, X1 Enterprise offers a faster, safer, and far more cost-effective way to execute complex information governance projects—turning what used to be massive, reactive, months-long efforts into streamlined, proactive, and strategic workflows.

Learn more about how X1 Enterprise can streamline your next information governance project. 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, CaCPA, Cloud Data, Corporations, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Governance, law firm, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

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June 25, 2025 · 12:00 PM

Modernizing eDiscovery: A Huge Strategic Win for Legal Operations Executives

By John Patzakis

Modern In-Place Data Discovery

For today’s corporate legal departments, controlling runaway costs is no longer optional — it’s a mandate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the spiraling expenses for outsourced eDiscovery and information governance services. While litigation and regulatory demands continue to grow, many organizations still rely heavily on costly outside service providers to identify, collect, process, and produce electronically stored information (ESI). This outdated model drains budgets, strains timelines, and introduces unnecessary risk.

Enter the modern legal operations executive. One of their core responsibilities is to identify inefficiencies and leverage technology to reduce costs and streamline workflows. Modernizing eDiscovery and information governance processes is a very fertile and high-impact opportunity to do exactly that. Doing so can save organizations tens of millions of dollars in hard (actual) costs. Here’s how:

1) Bring eDiscovery In-House and Slash Costs with the Right Technology

Outsourced eDiscovery vendors typically charge steep hourly rates and volume-based markups for even routine tasks like identifying and collecting custodial data. Yet studies — and real-world case studies — consistently show that corporations can reduce eDiscovery costs by up to 90% by adopting targeted collection and in-place search technology.

Solutions like X1 Enterprise enable legal and compliance teams to index and search data in place — without cumbersome, time-consuming manual collection. By deploying this technology internally, the legal operations team can replace costly third-party workflows, including highly inefficient Microsoft 365 processes, with faster, defensible, and far less expensive processes. This means greater control over timelines and budgets, and reduced exposure to data security risks associated with handing over large volumes of sensitive information to multiple vendors.

2) Drive Broader Efficiencies Beyond Litigation

The benefits of a modern eDiscovery platform extend far beyond document production in a lawsuit. The same technology can be leveraged for critical information governance and data compliance functions. For example, when a company needs to respond to internal audits, regulatory data access requests, or data privacy audits and inquiries, in-place search capabilities allow teams to quickly find and manage relevant data without reinventing the wheel each time.

Legal operations executives can champion the use of enterprise eDiscovery tools for these broader use cases, creating synergies between compliance, privacy, IT, and legal teams. This not only reduces redundant spending on separate point solutions but also ensures better control of data and improved risk management across the organization.

3) Partner with Finance to Uncover Hidden Cost Savings

A key role of legal operations is to align legal spend with broader corporate financial goals. When evaluating an in-house eDiscovery solution, legal ops leaders should engage their CFO early. One common pitfall is focusing solely on capital IT budgets while overlooking how much is siphoned away from the legal operating budget to fund expensive outsourced eDiscovery services.

In one real-world example, a company assumed they could not afford an internal solution based on their limited IT budget. However, when they worked with their CFO to analyze total eDiscovery spending, they discovered they were paying tens of millions annually from a separate operating budget to outside providers. Redirecting even a fraction of this spend towards a robust internal platform not only paid for the technology but will yield millions in net savings — year after year.

Final Thoughts

For legal operations executives looking to deliver immediate cost savings, increase efficiency, and elevate the department’s strategic value, modernizing eDiscovery and information governance processes is perhaps their greatest opportunity for an immediate and significant impact. By bringing the process in-house with proven technology like X1 Enterprise, expanding its use to multiple compliance and governance scenarios, and partnering with finance to eliminate wasteful spending, legal operations can transform eDiscovery and information governance from a financial drain into a model of operational excellence.

Interested in learning more about how to achieve this transformation? Schedule a briefing today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

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June 17, 2025 · 2:56 PM

X1 Enterprise Is the Gold Standard for Data Separation in M&A Matters

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

X1 is the Gold Standard in Data Separation

Corporate mergers and acquisitions are complex enough on their own — but when a deal involves the divestiture of an entire business unit or a carve-out of specific departments, the stakes for separating data correctly and efficiently become even higher. Legal and IT teams must identify and surgically separate emails, documents, and other unstructured electronic information to ensure that the right data goes to the acquiring party — and that what must be retained remains secure and compliant with privacy and legal requirements.

This data separation exercise is notorious for being time-consuming, extremely expensive, and highly disruptive. This is because traditional methods require heavy lifting by IT teams and service providers, endless back-and-forth with custodians, and mass data collections that literally double the risk. Worse yet, Microsoft Purview, with its known throttling and low throughput challenges for M 365 data, is not up to the task for data separation matters that invariably involve at least dozens of terabytes. These inefficiencies all lead to severe regulatory risks, runaway costs, and critical delays.

There is, however, a far better way — X1 Enterprise. Several major corporations have recently employed X1 Enterprise in high-stakes data separation matters. Once completed, the comments from our customers are the same: There was no other way they could have done it without spending millions of dollars on time-consuming and disruptive services.

Data Separation Is Not Just Another eDiscovery Project

Unlike standard eDiscovery, a divestiture-driven data separation project must carve out large volumes of live, operational data while the business continues to run. Legacy tools and processes require copying and moving the entire subject data set to a separate repository for indexing and searching — adding huge costs, time delays, and operational risk.

X1 Enterprise’s game-changing advantage lies in its distributed micro-indexing architecture and true index-in-place capability. This unique approach allows organizations to instantly search, categorize, and separate or otherwise remediate massive volumes of data where it resides — without duplicating and exporting entire data sets to third-party servers for processing.

In practical terms, this means:

Lightning-Fast Search: X1 Enterprise creates lightweight, local micro-indexes on endpoints and servers across the organization. Search results come back in seconds, no matter where the data lives — on laptops, file shares, or cloud repositories such as M365.

Minimal Disruption: Because the data stays in place, there is no need to duplicate or move sensitive content, minimizing the risk of data leakage, avoiding the bottlenecks that come with data copying and migration for centralized processing, and enabling the actual remediation to be infinitely more effective by working on the live data set. How do you execute data separation when you are working off a stale copy of the data for the categorization effort? The short answer: Up to millions of dollars in manual services to go back to the “original data” and manually separate the data for each employee and their respective data sources.

Scalability and Control: Whether the divestiture involves hundreds or thousands of custodians across geographies, X1 Enterprise scales seamlessly while giving legal and IT teams centralized control and real-time oversight.

Defensible Process: Legal teams can generate audit trails, reports, and logs to demonstrate a precise and defensible chain of custody, which is critical for regulatory and contractual compliance.

The Bottom Line: Much Faster, with Dramatically less Cost and Risk.

When time is money — and delays can put entire deals at risk — organizations cannot afford cumbersome, legacy eDiscovery workflows for carve-out data separation projects. X1 Enterprise’s innovative architecture empowers legal, compliance, and IT teams to execute precise data separations faster, with dramatically lower cost and business impact.

For any organization facing a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, X1 Enterprise is not just an upgrade — it is the modern standard for high-stakes data separation and governance.

Learn more about how X1 Enterprise can streamline your next M&A project. 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, compliance, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

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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 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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