Andrew's Blog

SourceOne - In-House eDiscovery and Governance In and Out of the Archive

As a Fortune 200 company that is the world's leader in information storage and management, one of the largest software companies in the world, as well as a leader in information security, EMC has a differentiated ability to solve the eDiscovery challenge.  The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) reflects the reality that the eDiscovery challenge is, at its core, all about "Information Management" - how is the organization managing its (especially) unstructured content, and what policies are in place and being enforced, if any, in the first place?  Then, when a new eDiscovery case hits - what processes and tools does it have, if any, to automate an otherwise reactive and expensive eDiscovery process, especially for collection, hold, analysis and review? 

With EMC SourceOne, EMC is delivering a differentiated family of solutions to the marketplace - that allows organizations not only scalable enterprise archiving (and eDiscovery within the archive), but also fast to deploy appliances for in-house eDiscovery functionality to index 100s of types of content outside managed archives - "in the wild" - (for example on desktops, file shares, sharepoint, and many other content types).  Once the index is created, robust eDiscovery functionality can be applied to the underlying content (for forensically sound collection, hold, analysis, and review) to drive significant cost out of the process, provide insight into huge volumes of information that was otherwise growing without being leveraged, as well as the ability to apply policy for classification, retention, deletion, privacy and security of the content.

EMC is already the company that the best organizations in the world trust to manage their information assets.  Now, EMC's ability to securely and at massive scale deliver the above functionality - BOTH within and outside of archives and BOTH for proactive policies and for in-house eDiscovery - is differentiated and unique.

For more information, please see the following link:  SourceOne Discovery Collector

Video Interview Discussing eDiscovery, Compliance and SourceOne

The attached link is a brief interview of me discussing eDiscovery challenges that customers are facing, and how SourceOne can address those challenges. 

Download SourceOne-Andy

How are we going to fund compliance?

With the roiling of the financial markets, the almost unprecedented incursion of government into the marketplace, and with a strong consensus that there has been too little regulation in the past decade, one thing is certain - government investigations, lawsuits and new regulations are on the rise.  At a macro level, many fiscally conservative people worry that too much regulation will stifle investment and innovation.  When you take it down a level, the businesses and other organizations that are subject to regulation - and the people within those orgs responsible for meeting the requirements - wonder how this is going to be funded, especially in recessionary times.  

The answer to this challenge is that compliance solutions need to a business case justification; a showing that the solution will - in the real world - save the company money.

Bringing eDiscovery In-House For Dummies

Jake Frazier -- who is a senior member of my compliance practice, as well as having an extensive background in the eDiscovery space (Sedona Conference, EDRM, executive experience at a number of eDiscovery firms, etc.) -- has recently published "Bringing eDiscovery In-House for Dummies".  This is a great piece of collateral and it can be downloaded at eDiscovery for Dummies Download. 

Step 2, Step 1

If you're reading this blog, you may already be familiar with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (www.EDRM.net), which is a one page eDiscovery process model.  It is becoming a widely adopted standard for displaying and articulating the steps of the eDiscovery process, beginning on the far left hand side of the model with "Information Management" (the current state of how an organization is, or is not, managing its electronic information), and then as you move from left to right, the model reflects the various steps of the eDiscovery process ("identification, collection, preservation, analysis," etc.) 

What is GRC, and how are information policies set?

The phrase “Governance, Risk and Compliance” or “GRC” is a common catch phrase with corporate customers, analysts, technology vendors and consultants. It is often used in the context of organizational struggles to meet legal obligations associated with information management. But what does GRC really mean?

EMC Solution for eDiscovery Collection

During the last week, EMC formally launched the Solution for eDiscovery Collection. The Solution combines the StoredIQ indexing appliance with EMC's compliance infrastructure. The technology is finally mature enough to really deliver a return on investment; it really works. The following is a link to a 10 minute demo of the solution. If you're spending too much on eDiscovery, and/or if you're at all interested in "bringing eDiscovery in house" I recommend you spend a few minutes and view it: EMC Solution for eDiscovery Collection Demo.  EMC will also conduct free proof of concepts (POCs), where you can use the solution on your own data sets to test for yourself how well it works.

Information Compliance

I am going to begin a series of posts dealing with "Information Compliance" (aka "Governance Risk and Compliance - GRC"). 

To kick it off, I'm attaching a storyboard that shows, with pictures, some of the challenges that organizations face in putting policy management discipline around their information so that they can achieve the three (3) core goals of information management - reduce cost, reduce risk, and extract value from organizational information. 

http://andrewsblog.typepad.com/Compliance_Series.pdf

Faux eDiscovery

The following is a new article, entitled "Avoiding Faux eDiscovery" recently published by Jim Shook and myself.  Jim is an attorney, eDiscovery expert and member of Sedona Conference.   

Download faux_e_discovery.pdf

eDiscovery Crystal Ball

Craig Ball, an EED special master and frequent contributor to law.com, wrote an article today about his crystal ball predictions for eDiscovery.  Not surprisingly, these predictions mirror some forward looking trends in IT.  This is not surprising because eDiscovery potentially impacts all aspects of an organization's information and information management strategies, policies, governance and compliance.

The link is http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1201864414445.

Included in the article are predictions about virtualization, networked storage, storage and content management in the cloud, security, privacy, and the use of appliances to index and efficiently collect content.  All of these trends read like a roadmap to EMC's product and solution portfolio and strategy (http://www.emc.com/products/index.htm).