Andrew's Blog

EMC to Acquire Kazeon Systems, Inc.

EMC today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Kazeon.  I'll have the honor of running the Kazeon business, which will be placed under  the EMC SourceOne brand, and will be part of EMC’s Information Governance strategy. 

To say that Kazeon is a differentiated technology is an understatement.  Kazeon has built a scalable, but fast to deploy software that allows for the indexing, collection, analysis and review of content from across the enterprise, allowing customers to bring eDiscovery in-house, and advance their longer term information governance strategies. Other players in this market have pieces of this puzzle, or collections of products that they call "end to end" solutions, but in fact are hard to deploy, integrate and maintain. Only Kazeon offers true "end to end" in-house eDiscovery in an integrated architecture and fast to deploy appliance model.  

eDiscovery is one of the most acute information governance pain points for organizations because:  eDiscovery is mandatory, it is risky, and it is being done today in reactive and wildly expensive ways.  The economics are simple - the less automation, the more an organization over-collects (by manually collecting whole backup tapes and whole disk drives - rather than collecting only the information that is relevant).  The larger the collection, the more information that is sent to outside parties for processing and charge-by-the-hour legal review, and in turn, the more money that is spent.  It makes no sense to spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on a single case, and when the case is over, to have nothing to show for it - that money will need to be spent anew when the next lawsuit or investigation hits. 

Kazeon doesn't just solve the in-house eDiscovery problem, it advances information governance in a tangible way, by federating the collection of metadata - allowing customers to do in-house eDiscovery and apply other policies, and take other actions, on content that is "in the wild" - in fileshares, desktops, Sharepoint and other places across the enterprise.

When I was a law firm attorney – a long time ago;) – I handled a case for a gas company, and I remember one of my witnesses making the comment that natural gas in a controlled state is the safest most efficient energy source in the world, but in an uncontrolled state, it explodes.  So too with information. When we have ways to apply policy to information – to gain insight into it, take action upon it based on its value, to govern it - information is one of the most critical assets of an organization, as or more important that any other asset, other than the people within an enterprise.  However, when information is left to pile up with no controls, policies or management, it can turn into a costly liability - like natural gas in an uncontrolled state...

Information governance remains an elusive goal at essentially every organization in the world.  The reason is that information is getting created faster than individual human beings, or even existing systems, can possibly organize it.  Many companies, large and small, have promised to deliver on the vision of true information governance – most by asking customers to put all their information in a single monolithic repository or single monolithic indexing platform.  In theory, this could work, but in the real world doing this can take years, it is costly, and involves the creation of duplicative infrastructures. 

EMC’s SourceOne strategy, with the addition of Kazeon, is different and simple.  We are taking a practical and modular approach.  Rather than asking customers to put everything in one repository, we provide them with building blocks that allow them to quickly deploy a solution to solve an immediate problem, save money and advance the longer term information governance strategy – “enterprise strategy, digestible pieces”. 

EMC is already the leader in information storage, and as a result, we’re already managing the world’s most sensitive and important information.  We’re taking Kazeon and integrating it tightly to EMC storage, making it one of the most mature, secure and scalable solutions on the market.  Moreover, EMC is first to the market with the modular but integrated combination of archive technologies, records management technologies and Kazeon's unique fast to deploy index in place technologies.  We now have the ability to apply policy to, and conduct in-house eDiscovery on, electronically stored information (ESI) both within and outside managed repositories ("in the wild").  No one else can do this in the same way, and the value to customers is tremendous. 

More to come, but for now I'll just say how excited we are about what EMC can do for our customers with Kazeon, and the other stable of EMC and SourceOne offerings. 

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