Hi, I’m Keith Zoellner, Chief Technology Officer of StoredIQ. During the last several years, meeting with 100s of legal and IT teams around the country; one pain point emerged while observing real teams trying to nail down a repeatable eDiscovery process: collecting and preserving data from corporate desktops. While less than 20% of the total data typically collected during eDiscovery comes from desktops, it seems that 80% of the problems occur during the desktop collection process. With previous StoredIQ offerings, all data source integrations were developed using “agent-less and gateway-less” technology, with ease of management and minimal TCO in mind. However, given the often remote and distributed nature of desktops and the inherent pain of desktop collections, StoredIQ set off with the goal of improving the desktop collection process by developing an intelligent desktop agent.
Having surveyed commercial and home grown desktop collection solutions, we were very surprised that most companies were still using manual IT processes that required an actual visit to each and every desktop, interrupting the end user for a number of hours, and over-collecting data by about 90%. The processes were manual, prone to error, and very often required multiple revisits as additional custodians were identified as potentially relevant to a case.
For those companies that had invested in automation, many of these solutions would literally collect every bit of data from every desktop, drag this data across low bandwidth, latency ridden networks; and without any intelligent way to manage incremental, ongoing collections. We observed others avoiding the technical issues altogether, but were absorbing legal risk by only collecting documents with certain extensions, in certain directories; clearly exposing the organization by not evaluating all potentially relevant custodian data.
We took all of these technical and functional challenges into account, and developed the StoredIQ ‘Just-in-Time’ Desktop Agent. Available as a companion product to StoredIQ’s Intelligent Information Management Platform, it is the fastest, most efficient and IT-friendly solution on the market today for intelligent desktop collection. The solution is optimized for repeatable and scalable execution, evaluating all desktop data, but only collecting potentially relevant user files across the network. On initial desktop collections for a given custodian, StoredIQ will collect 5% to 10% of the data most current “collect everything over the network” solutions, and will do so in a fraction of the time. For subsequent collections of the same desktop, StoredIQ will only collect incremental data with consideration for data collected for a current matter and data that might have been collected for a previous matter.
While the desktop collection problem clearly needs added intelligence in the form of an agent, IT organizations would prefer to avoid managing yet another agent across 10s or 100s of thousands of desktops when, in most cases, only 15 to 30 desktops really need to be collected. With minimal TCO in mind, StoredIQ’s desktop agent can be deployed in minutes and automatically uninstalls at the culmination of all collections tasks, without end user knowledge (optional) or involvement.
For more information, check out our desktop agent flash demo. I think you’ll see that we’ve created an intelligent desktop collection solution that is efficient and easy for IT to execute, while maintaining the all important legally defensible audit trail.
