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

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