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.

The StoredIQ indexing appliance is rolled into a data center, pointed at servers, and almost immediately it will index terabytes of content a day, thus allowing Legal to "ping" the index for robust searching, and providing IT with tremendous insight into the content of the information that they are managing (without impacting users of the content).

The solution can greatly reduce the costs of eDiscovery by making files share, emails and other content subject to efficient search and "quick peek" early case assessment, collection with chain of custody, de-duplication, Rule 26 "topology reporting", secure litigation hold on Centera, records remediation on to Documentum, and export of potentially relevant content in common formats such as Concordance Load Files. The core value proposition is simple - rather than reactively paying third parties each time there is a new case to collect all content by media type (e.g. backup tapes and hard drives), you can leverage repeatable processes and in-house tools to collect content intelligently, de-duplicate it, and send less outside for processing and attorney review; the less you send out, the less money you spend on eDiscovery.

I note that to balance efficiency and functionality, the solution allows for full text indexing of the files, emails and other content on servers, or alternatively, a "Thindex" of only certain metadata (such as creation dates, and custodians).  Think of the following analogy: compare the files, emails and other content on the servers at your organization to Federal Express envelopes; a "Thindex" would index only the labels of the FedEx envelopes, and the full text index would index the labels as well as all of the contents within the FedX envelope. I note that today, IT and Legal have neither - they might know the total volume of FedEx envelopes that they have (most large enterprises have 100s of millions or billions of such files), but it is as if each envelope has no label, nor does IT have any visibility into the contents of those envelopes.  It is no wonder that traditionally the eDiscovery process has been so broken and inefficient - you blindly collect huge volumes and then pay expensive attorney hourly rates to sort it out on the back end.  That will change.  (This insightful analogy was recently described to me by Keith Zoellner.)

For more information, please see the launch materials on EMC.com:  EMC Solution for eDiscovery Collection Launch Materials