The growing volume and greater dispersion of data, new methods of collaboration, and the emergence of new internet-based applications pose their own challenges to finding and utilizing information most effectively. Combined with legal, regulatory, and privacy directives, data governance has become an increasing challenge for enterprise organizations. A new white paper from Enterprise Strategy Group addresses how corporations can turn Information Governance from a priority into reality.

Take action. Start governing.

This paper addresses some of the most common use cases for deploying information governance solutions including: eDiscovery, Compliance, Storage Optimization, Data Mapping, and Data Migration—focusing on the immediate ROI and long-term impact. Download the ESG whitepaper and take a step toward actionable information governance:

• Determine what data you have and where it is
• Clean-up trash and de-duplicate data
• Analyze contents and access patterns to determine appropriate policy
• Migrate data to the appropriate storage tier for greater cost efficiency
• Enforce policy for retention and deletion, potentially expiring what’s beyond usefulness or mandated compliance retention

‘Boil-the-ocean’ approaches stall many information management projects. Companies can gain more immediate near-term benefit and ROI by tying actionable information governance to other high-priority large-scale IT initiatives. Tackling an immediate and acute project like eDiscovery or regulatory response, storage optimization, or records management initialization can be an opportunity for ‘go-forward clean-up’ by adding elements of good information governance and better data management.

– Katey Wood, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group

The ESG whitepaper is available from the StoredIQ website at www.info.storediq.com/esg

For information about how StoredIQ can provide actionable information governance solutions for eDiscovery, records management, compliance, and storage optimization, email info@storediq.com.

Seeing growing customer demand for eDiscovery, Records Management, and Compliance solutions for cloud-based data, StoredIQ has announced support for cloud-based Exchange and SharePoint residing within Microsoft Office 365 (formerly Microsoft Business Productivity Office Suite – BPOS). With this extended capability, Microsoft Office 365 customers can utilize StoredIQ to gain the same deep visibility and understanding of their cloud-based email and SharePoint data as they do with StoredIQ’s on-premise information governance solutions.

Customers, including a major U.S. car manufacturer, are using StoredIQ to quickly connect to Microsoft Office 365 to identify, collect and manage Exchange email and SharePoint data for responding to eDiscovery requests, applying records policies, and adhering to regulatory compliance mandates. As a result, StoredIQ provides enterprises with actionable information governance solutions to realize the benefits of cloud computing while still fulfilling their legal and compliance requirements.

According to 451 Research, cloud computing continues to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent and will reach $16.7 billion in revenue by 2013.

As enterprises continue moving data to the cloud, information governance challenges are becoming more complex. StoredIQ’s Platform connects to Microsoft Office 365 and indexes its data, combining the ability to identify, collect, and manage cloud-based data for legal discovery and records management into an integrated information governance application as a means of preempting litigation and reducing potential legal risks associated with cloud data storage.

– David Horrigan, analyst, eDiscovery and information governance at 451 Research

As a way to minimize storage costs and IT investments, we are seeing more and more customers move data to the cloud. Whether on-premise or in the cloud, StoredIQ can provide a highly scalable solution for governing all enterprise data and ensure that data placed in the cloud is discoverable for litigation, regulatory inquiries, and records retention scheduling.

StoredIQ’s support for Microsoft Office 365 includes:

• Identification and collection of data from both Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online
• Integration with Active Directory
• Auto–detection of both mailboxes and SharePoint sub-sites in the cloud
• Connection throttling to Microsoft Office 365 in order to maximize network efficiency
• Managed security and access, along with automatic activity and chain–of–custody reporting

For more information about our actionable information governance solutions – for on premise or cloud-based data – please email info@storediq.com.

1. I’m thankful that my Information Governance technology can orchestrate all my ESI better than a professional chef can orchestrate a gourmet Thanksgiving feast.
2. I’m thankful that the eDiscovery for this court case didn’t cost me an arm and a (turkey) leg.
3. I’m thankful that my eDiscovery solution helps me settle legal arguments quicker than I can settle family disputes at the dinner table.
4. I’m thankful for “fat pants” after eating a Thanksgiving dinner that makes Big Data look small.
5. I’m thankful that it’s easier to organize my electronic information than it is to organize who’s bringing which dish to Thanksgiving dinner.
6. I’m thankful that mapping my data is easier than teaching Great Aunt Thelma to use a Garmin to map her way to my house for Thanksgiving dinner.
7. I’m thankful that unlike football, my eDiscovery solution makes holding legal.
8. I’m thankful that I have an Information Governance solution sophisticated enough to let me find all my data—just like finding one person in the midst of the Macy’s Day Parade.
9. I’m thankful that I know the difference between spoliation of evidence, and spoiled leftovers.
10. I’m thankful that finding my ESI isn’t as hard as finding cranberry sauce at the grocery store on Thanksgiving morning.

Happy Thanksgiving from StoredIQ!

I recently read an article in LTN, authored by Evan Kobletz, covering the Guidance product announcement – “Guidance Adds Data Re-use Feature to EnCase eDiscovery”. After some discussion at StoredIQ, we’re actually pretty excited about the coverage. It sheds light on capability that we’ve had for years now, and probably don’t talk enough about. In fact, the article also highlights several competitors that still don’t have it. The StoredIQ term for ‘Data Re-use’ is ‘Incremental, Single-Instance Collection’, but setting aside semantics, we believe it’s a fundamental component for conducting thorough, legally sound eDiscovery collections.

What does this mean to eDiscovery customers? The first time a file is relevant to a case, we’ll take a forensically sound copy and place it on a retention server for preservation with a litigation hold tag specific to the given matter, without altering the metadata and without interrupting end users. If it’s an ongoing case, we’ll perform incremental collections – meaning that we’ll only get another copy if that file has been changed (or if other new relevant files are created). When another case crops up, and the same file is once again relevant, StoredIQ is aware that the file is already on retention and instead of taking the time, bandwidth and storage space to collect another copy StoredIQ just places an additional hold tag on the file. If your company is in a highly litigious industry or has a number of serial litigants, you can imagine the savings this can add up to over time. Only when all matters for a given file are concluded, and the obligation for legal hold is removed, will the file be available for disposition from the repository.

Possibly because StoredIQ has had this capability for quite some time, we’ve taken for granted that incremental, single-instance collection is a standard feature of any intelligent eDiscovery technology that has a collections component. And more importantly, a feature that eDiscovery customers should consider closely. Note that the article also mentions that this feature also enables users to “search collection sets from previous litigation”. That statement alone makes me wonder how many case collections have been jeopardized by not having the capability to search and produce data from the preservation location used by previous and simultaneous, on-going cases?

On a broader scale, in the LTN article, Kobletz, states, “Data reuse is a growing trend in the e-discovery industry.” We at StoredIQ actually see ‘data reuse’, to use the same term, as a trend that goes well beyond eDiscovery. The same data that your legal team needs to identify and collect for a legal matter, is also the same data that your records management team needs to classify, your IT team needs to store and manage, and your compliance officers need to govern. At the end of the day, your corporate data is all being ‘re-used’ by multiple departments – not just the legal team for multiple matters.

What companies need is the ability to identify, classify, manage, and act on their data assets – to provide value across the entire organization. That’s something you won’t get from Guidance, or any point solution eDiscovery product. At StoredIQ, we’re focused on delivering powerful information governance products that can provide the comprehensive data insight and control that corporate counsel, compliance managers, and  records managers need to make the best and most informed decisions, while meeting the stringent requirements that IT departments demand.

StoredIQ’s unique approach to conducting early case assessment on data “in the wild”, has been recognized by analysts at IDC as a market differentiator in their 2011 MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications Report. The report evaluates the capabilities of early case assessment (ECA) vendor solutions and is designed to help CIOs, corporate legal counsel, compliance officers, and legal service providers understand the key capabilities, the evolving use cases, and market and technology dynamics for the early case assessment solutions and the broader eDiscovery market segment. Among the twelve vendors included in the report, IDC positioned StoredIQ as a leader in the standalone ECA space, a market forecasted by IDC to total $400.8 million in 2011 and reach $857.0 million in 2015.

According to IDC, “Customers cite StoredIQ’s ability to enable the analysis and culling of data at the source prior to preservation and collection as a key differentiator.” IDC goes on to say that StoredIQ “Boasts highly rated indexing, search, and retrieval performance, and the ability to scale. Customers that are looking to search and analyze the universe of content prior to collection highly rate StoredIQ’s ability to scale, as well as StoredIQ’s search and retrieval performance.”

IDC’s recognition of StoredIQ as a market leader validates our innovative and novel approach to conducting ECA prior to preservation and collection. Our powerful ability to perform early case analysis on data where it natively resides gives legal counsel the ability to assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, and make decisions concerning the matter far earlier in the eDiscovery process. Unique among evaluated vendors, StoredIQ’s approach yields a much stronger ROI as data is identified, understood and culled where it lives in the enterprise rather than after costly collections, culling and processing in a central location.

StoredIQ’s early case assessment offering is part of the company’s DiscoveryIQ application. Product strengths and key differentiators identified by IDC include:

• Ability to directly connect to and search a variety of data sources including: major messaging systems (Exchange, Notes/Domino), distributed endpoints, network file shares, export files, major archival and storage systems (EMCCentera, Hitachi HCAP, IBM FileNet, IBM Information Archive, NetApp Snaplock, Symantec Enterprise Vault), content management systems (EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet), and Microsoft SharePoint (including wikis and blogs in addition to document libraries), and laptops/desktops.
• Ability to enable the analysis and culling of data at the source, prior to preservation and collection.
• Highly rated indexing, search and retrieval performance, as well as the ability to scale.
• Ability to perform real-time what-if risk/reward assessments utilizing the DiscoveryIQ application. Based on different culling decisions, customers can see a real-time “scoreboard” provide updated estimates of review costs for a given data set or case.
• Streamlined workflow designed to enable IT and the legal users to collaborate throughout the eDiscovery process.

To learn more about StoredIQ’s Early Case Assessment solution:

• Download an excerpt from the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications Report
• Download StoredIQ AnalyzeAnywhere Technology Brief
• Email info@storediq.com

Historically, performing legal holds has been a very manual and labor intensive process. Spanning multiple systems, it was time consuming to administer, almost impossible to track, and relied heavily on custodian self-preservation. StoredIQ’s integrated hold notifications with intelligent data collection, as part of a comprehensive eDiscovery workflow creates a holistic and legally defensible process which eliminates the burden on custodians, improves efficiency, and reduces legal risk.

Vivian Tero, Program Director for GRC Infrastructure, IDC

The importance of an integrated legal hold solution recently came to light in Treppel v. Biovail Corp., 249 F.R.D. 111 (S.D.N.Y. April 2), which states that a standard “litigation hold” memo to company employees is not enough. As soon as litigation becomes a reasonable possibility, a potential litigant must act quickly to identify potential sources of evidence, and act to preserve that evidence.

Though it is important to notify potential custodians of their duty to preserve data, the true value of a legal hold solution is the ability to then take action on custodian data. This is why we’ve seamlessly integrated the legal hold workflow with DiscoveryIQ, StoredIQ’s eDiscovery application. Companies can ensure compliance with case law, initiate hold notifications, track acknowledgements, perform early case assessment across all matter relevant data, and perform single-instance collection to a secure retention platform.

For a complete list of Legal Hold features, download the StoredIQ Legal Hold Technology Brief, visit our Legal Hold site, or email info@storediq.com.

HP acquisition of Autonomy great for the Information Management market … but a risky ‘all in’ move for the participants

The World Series of Poker 2011 has just wound down in Las Vegas.  Yesterday, HP & Autonomy moved the game to the Bay Area.

There is an age-old wisdom in poker that there is a strategy for betting a bluff.  And it seems like it really applies here in spades to HP & Autonomy.  The saying is this: ‘If you bluff at the pot, you better be willing to follow it up and put all your money at risk’.  I’m reminded of that as I watched the stunning move HP made to acquire Autonomy.  Spending $10.4B of the ~$12.9B they have in cash is truly an ‘all in’ move. 

But, is it a wise one?  Or, a bluff that every other vendor will now call? 

First, the good news.  This is GREAT news for everyone who has spent the past five years pushing the Information Management marketplace, trying to get enterprises to prioritize getting their petabytes of information in order BEFORE they jump into fire fighting in eDiscovery, compliance or any other issue that demanded real-time, relevant information to make decisions. Several thought leaders, most notably Deb Logan at Gartner and George Socha with the EDRM group have been forecasting an organizational shift based on a growing wisdom that the cost, complexity and risk that corporations have is just too high without good information management and governance solutions. 

This acquisition clearly validates the value of this shift and a perspective shift in how this problem needs to be solved.  

HP has now bet their businesses on the approach of ‘proactive information management’ is the winning hand in the Big Data market. 

We believe their intentions and this latest merger will trigger a firestorm in the space that will be healthy for customers, vendors and solution providers.  History tells us so.  In almost any market that developed into a BIG space, there was a point in time where an outbreak that was almost a religious war provided a catalyst.  Think the relational wars between Ingres and Oracle, the systems management wars between Tivoli and CA, the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape, the CRM wars between Siebel and Salesforce.com or even the search wars between Google and Yahoo. This acquisition provides a platform for some major conflict.  

So, what does this all mean to the rest of us?  We think it means we’re at the beginning of a paradigm shift and the best thing we can all do is prepare well for the change. They don’t pay us to be expert analysts (and we’re not) but from our seat, here are the Top 10 things that we believe will happen next: 

Top 10 Things that this Acquisition will Trigger

1. Vendors competing in Information Discovery, Governance or Management will add indexing engines to their products to compete with Autonomy.
2. CIOs will drive a shift to prioritizing Proactive Information Management vs. Reactive eDiscovery solutions.  
3. Scale will be the new IT benchmark … ‘last year’s news’ on data sampling and predictive coding will be replaced by how much data your engine can analyze. 
4. Customers will move towards establishing Information Management standards in terms of people, process and technologies.
5. A new IT Service will emerge around providing real-time ‘information intelligence’.
6. SIs and SPs will begin to build practices around Information Management.  
7. Executives will demand answers to ‘Big Data’ problems from their CIOs. 
8. Boards will require reports on how governance standards are being adhered to. 
9. Mirror-image Cloud-based services will emerge to provide tactical stop-gap solutions for a plethora of Information Management applications. 
10. Some business will create a competitive advantage that moves them from one of the pack to a leader in their industry based on the sophistication of the ability to discover, govern and make decisions faster based on their insight into Big Data. 

Now for the bad news.  And maybe a gratitutous eleventh forecast.  HP will struggle mightily with integrating Autonomy if they can even get shareholder approval for it (does this seem like Compaq déjà vu or what?) before ultimately creating the analogous version of OpenView for Information Management.  Only this time maybe it will be called ‘CloseView’ given the proprietary nature of Autonomy? 

And one last piece of perhaps self-serving forecast.  There were only two vendors in this space who built their business with the philosophy of building an information management platform capable of managing enterprise-scale data volumes in the petabytes of size … Autonomy and StoredIQ.  One took a closed approach and stitched together many acquired pieces to create a beast of a platform that only a vendor like HP could sell.  The other took a lean and mean approach to providing a simple, scalable and open platform that will embrace 100’s to 1000’s of partners to scale it.  It’s a model that every other winner has used before.

Aces in the hole here in Austin?

Despite the high cost of its painstaking preservation and storage, much of this data will never be relevant to any legal case. Indeed, according to a 2009 survey by Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, 60 to 80 percent of the information retained by corporations in America has no value from a business or legal perspective.

Legal departments have historically focused on the ‘right side’ of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) – the analysis and review stages. However, if the quality of collected data in the review platform is unnecessary, insufficient, spoiled, or irrelevant; this significantly increases an organization’s legal cost and risk.

Kiker goes on to say… the best approach for many companies is to get serious about cleaning up their information environments. By “taking out the trash” in a major way, companies stand to make big cuts in their annual data-storage bills, which can also run into the six figures. This also enables them to more quickly and more accurately identify potentially relevant information for the attorneys to sift through during a review process, potentially lowering their legal bills.

Legal teams are increasingly realizing the business value and ROI from strengthening their company’s ‘left-side’ EDRM capabilities and understand that sound information governance practices result in highly targeted and effective eDiscovery.

The article points out that shrinking the overall stack of data is a good start to minimizing eDiscovery costs, but companies also need to find all the relevant information contained in their data. He says:

Data mapping offers a way to solve this problem. The basic idea is to create a master index that spells out exactly where content is stored. Surprisingly, many companies have never taken this critical information management step.

In fact, Barry Murphy was reflecting on the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Conference and commented in his blog: Get specific. Know where data lives and do the data maps.  It’s impossible to preserve data if you don’t know where it is.

At StoredIQ we couldn’t agree more. To prove it, during the month of August, StoredIQ is extending a promotional offer for our data assessment and mapping service. The first 10 qualified companies will pay only $10,000, a savings of $5,000 off list price.

StoredIQ Data Assessment Services provide unprecedented visibility into the unstructured data across the enterprise. This invaluable service quickly gives organizations critical understanding of their business content to make more informed decisions about the management, retention, and disposition of their data.

To learn more about this offer and to take the first step toward managing your escalating ESI-related costs and risk – contact us today!

Planning for FINRA Compliance
With the effective date only a few months away, broker-dealers will need to be prepared to show updated policies and procedures with supporting systems to be ready for their 2012 FINRA audit. Compliance officers should ask:

• Do we have the systems capabilities in place to identify, track and preserve the required records?
• Is now a good time to perform a holistic data assessment review of the information and records your firm currently has stored across all data repositories, content management systems and archives?
• Are you able to implement defensible data deletion policies as prescribed by the new FINRA requirements?
  Can your current data storage and archiving capabilities withstand the volumes for day-to-day reporting and historical archiving? If not, how can you strategically clean up your data storage?
• Will new technologies be needed to assist, and what does the implementation timetable look like to be in compliance by December?

Meeting FINRA Requirements with StoredIQ
StoredIQ’s Information Governance solution provides broker-dealers with a comprehensive, secure and efficient approach to meeting their FINRA information governance needs. With StoredIQ, companies can manage risk and contain costs by leveraging automated compliance and governance policies.  The result is an efficient and cost-effective answer for today’s highly regulated business world.

By implementing StoredIQ now and planning accordingly, broker-dealers can be in compliance by the December 5th FINRA implementation date and ready for a 2012 FINRA audit examination.

To learn more, download the StoredIQ FINRA Solution Sheet or contact us for more information.

Predictive coding patent dispute a ‘pebble in the storm’ for firms seeking to reduce the cost and complexity of eDiscovery.

We’ve been watching as the furor grows around Recommind’s recent claims to own the patents that will make computer-expedited review (AKA predictive coding) a proprietary process.  The implications may be onerous to be sure.  With Recommind out enforcing this patent against any and all review tools that use some form of it, vendors could be wrapped up in legal disputes for years to come.  The irony of this is that the very vendors who built their businesses to drive down the cost and complexity of eDiscovery may now be on a path to help it spiral out of control because of their own desire to control the market.

At StoredIQ, we’re focusing our energies on offering our customers a different perspective that will have a more meaningful impact on their future. While most of the focus in the press has been around the validity of Recommind’s patent and even the competitive aspects of whether or not Recommind can or should enforce a claim like this, we think that the pragmatic view of this dispute is that it is ‘fighting over last years prize’. That’s because in reality the market has already moved past review automation and is now starting to focus on the bigger problem of what happens before you ever hit review and employ predictive coding – the problem of over-collection. In fact, studies have shown that a majority of the time spent in review is wasted looking at documents that shouldn’t have ever been collected in the first place.

Understanding large data pools well enough to extract and collect relevant subsets for both reactive eDiscovery and proactive Information Governance is the single biggest cost reduction exercise any enterprise can focus on.

Gartner says it costs on average $18,750 per gigabyte in eDiscovery.  To drive down these costs, the industry needs innovative solutions that can quickly identify, analyze and collect information that’s relevant.  What is lost in most of this discussion is that a predictive coding patent is a nice innovation for review but it does little to solve the primary problem of information collection, governance and management … by far the biggest cost reduction opportunity in eDiscovery.

For those who have tried to apply these computer-expedited review technologies earlier in the cycle as collection solutions, all kinds of problems have emerged … from defensibility to chain of custody questions to trust that the ‘black box’ algorithms have found everything.  The idea that merely collecting ‘like’ documents from a large data pool that defy standard categorization based on a small sample is widely viewed for what it is … a short cut that is ‘guessing’ that the sample collected is representative of a much larger pool of data ‘in the wild’.

The good news is that there is already a better way to solve this problem.  Solutions are available that can proactively and efficiently index data ahead of time and store the intelligence about the data for discovery.  Hardened over the last decade, they are now proven to scale and have automated change management built-in.  At StoredIQ, we can provide a high-speed, high-precision discovery solution that works across petabytes of data. Contrary to the belief of many at the time we started down this path, we’ve found that this approach is the fastest, most reliable and lowest cost means of producing defensible data for legal. Now that we are in production with hundreds of installations , the results speak for themselves.

Take the recent Gulf Oil spill matter for example.  The customers using our approach have completed their data collection and validated a legally defensible dataset for review by both government regulators and other litigants.  In one case, the results reduced the amount of data by 100:1 over a very large data pool.  This was all done prior to review and took less than a month to complete the indexing, identification, collection and processing. The cost savings were significant, 95% savings compared to service provider collection and a mind-numbing amount in avoiding unnecessary review costs.  The litigants using the old school approach of collect everything and pare it down in review with tools like predictive coding?  Well, they’re still processing and their costs are not something anyone wants to talk about.

This patent dispute is hot right now but the focus will soon shift.  As Anne Kershaw and Joseph Howie found in their study in October 2010, ‘Crash or Soar’ there are advantages to predictive coding when compared to linear review.  But, the real advantage was when the technology was deployed post culling of the data because then the data truly was uniform.  The point of their study and that of many others is that the capability can serve a valuable purpose in the right environment.  But, without a foundation of good information management in front of it, the predictions are suspect at best.  As is the value of Recommind’s patent.

Leave your comments. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions.