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.

According to an article by Mark Brunelli, Senior News Editor with SearchDataManagement.com, a growing number of organizations are realizing that data governance is more important than ever and will take center stage in 2012. Based on a SearchDataManagement.com 2011 Reader survey, 77% of respondents either have, or are planning to implement, a data governance program – a 9% increase over last year.

In the article, Brunelli interviews Sunil Soares, director of information governance with IBM’s software group. According to Soares, “It’s [information governance] a trend that shows no signs of slowing as 2012 approaches. The increase in awareness can be attributed to business users who are at last taking ownership of data. In other words, organizations have realized that data problems are business problems.”

Similarly, according to the 2011 eDiscoveryJournal and ViaLumina Information Governance Survey, most people view information governance as an umbrella for multiple disciplines including eDiscovery, records management, security, compliance, storage and archiving, risk management, and privacy. The majority of survey respondents revealed that they are investigating Information Governance and actively working to determine how to apply it to their organizations.

As 2012 looms near, new regulatory mandates such as FINRA 4511 and 4512, and the Dodd-Frank Act put a renewed focus on the need for information governance solutions. Fred Pulzello and Sonali Bhavsar wrote in an article for Information Management magazine, “Companies that proactively invest in establishing information governance policies, procedures, and technology will improve the efficiency of their compliance programs and will be in the best shape to adapt quickly to the new rules and regulations and manage the risks associated with doing business in this environment.”

StoredIQ provides actionable information governance solutions, enabling organizations to gain visibility and control over business-critical information to meet their eDiscovery, records management, compliance, and storage management requirements. With StoredIQ, legal, records managers, compliance officers, or IT can utilize a suite of purpose-built applications that arm them with the information intelligence needed to minimize the cost and risk of governing the ever increasing amount of unstructured data stored across the enterprise.

As 2012 approaches we’d like to know, what are some of the biggest information governance challenges your organization faces? eDiscovery, Storage Optimization, Compliance, Records Management? With StoredIQ, information governance doesn’t have to be a boil the ocean approach; ROI can be attained through existing IT and compliance initiatives, or trigger events like eDiscovery or regulatory response. So as you plan your 2012 information governance initiatives, there is great value in knowing what data you have and where it resides, whether the efforts are reactive or proactive, or apply to legacy data or new policies. Use of information intelligence technology like StoredIQ is critical to informing, improving, and maintaining adequate data governance.

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.

Records Management, unfortunately too often sometimes seen as an expensive and necessary evil, is actually a solid starting point to realize bottom line financial gains, and minimize legal risk. According to a 2009 study by IDC, 60 to 80 percent of the information retained by corporations in America has no value from a business or legal perspective.

Content and records management systems can provide very powerful control over information, but they offer little value if content never makes it into the system. This is the Achilles heel of records management – requiring users to go through a manual filing process that they perceive as having little value to them. As a result, work-in-progress files and other content languish in unmanaged environments such as shared drives and desktops – out of sight and out of control. Realizing the increased legal and regulatory risk this presents.

Leveraging the deep data insight and control that we’ve brought to the legal department, StoredIQ’s new records management application, RecordsIQ, gives records managers the necessary data intelligence to identify, manage and clean-up corporate records. However, And unlike other solutions in the marketplace, RecordsIQ provides in-place analysis and classification of data without requiring knowledge worker involvement. By empowering the records management team to defensibly delete data, corporations can significantly reduce legal and compliance risks, and yield tangible ROI in the IT storage budget.

RecordsIQ is designed to address a wide range of records retention, disposition and management requirements.  By integrating an easy to use records management application with the power of the StoredIQ platform, records managers have a single solution to make informed decisions about the business value of their enterprise data, while increasing operational efficiencies and reducing risk and cost.

Key features of RecordsIQ include:

• Data topology map provides a clear understanding of data across the enterprise to facilitate appropriate data retention and disposition decisions
• Records management workflow streamlines the management of records policies across the enterprise
• Identification and classification of records according to business-value and pre-defined requirements
• Automatic execution of electronic records policies by taking action on data including copy, move, or delete based on records policies
• Defensible deletion of records with no business value by automatically destroying documents in compliance with corporate disposition policies

RecordsIQ is available now, to learn more:

• Download the RecordsIQ data sheet
• View the RecordsIQ video overview
• 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.

As is the case with most organizations these days we were faced with a growing amount of electronic data across our enterprise and needed to ensure complete control of that information. With StoredIQ we better understand the state of our data and work in tandem with our legal team, so they can formulate legal strategies earlier in the process and as a result significantly reduce eDiscovery-related cost.

– Carol Campbell-Larson, executive vice president and CIO, information systems at MGM

Every company deals with exponentially growing data volumes, but the entertainment industry is unique when it comes to eDiscovery and IP protection. Disputes over copyright, trademark, right of publicity and idea submission claims – to name just a few – are ever-present in the motion picture business. MGM is one of the forward-thinking companies who have moved the eDiscovery process in-house and are proactively managing their information to protect their data assets to reduce related risk and cost.

Market-leading companies like MGM use StoredIQ to respond rapidly and efficiently to legal matters, litigation, and investigations. Utilizing StoredIQ, corporate legal teams can locate, analyze and act upon unstructured electronically stored information much more comprehensively and efficiently. As a result, companies can better manage their legal risk and reduce expenses, while formulating superior legal strategies. With StoredIQ, MGM and other companies can:

• Proactively manage their corporate data assets to meet their eDiscovery and regulatory compliance mandates
• Quickly locate matter-relevant ESI with advanced search technology
• Analyze electronic documents “in the wild”, where they natively reside without having to move data to a separate location
• Leverage a user-friendly legal and IT workflow and a scoreboard that keeps track of review costs as data is identified, preserved and collected
• Preserve and collect only the smallest legally defensible dataset to a secure legal hold repository, preserving all metadata and context
• Perform first-pass reviews on documents before exporting data downstream
• Act on and manage potentially relevant data in a legally defensible manner with audit trails and a robust chain of custody.

With StoredIQ, MGM streamlines eDiscovery, leverages early case analysis and reduces cost while proactively managing their IP data assets.

To learn more about StoredIQ, visit our website, or email us at info@storediq.com.

We are pleased to be one of the first technology companies from Austin to receive this award. The recognition demonstrates the success StoredIQ is continuing to gain throughout 2011. With the growing rate of unstructured data accumulating exponentially in corporations, IT infrastructures are becoming increasingly more complex. The large amount of electronically stored information (ESI) increases corporations’ legal and IT departments risk and creates challenges in a number of areas including litigation and compliance.

StoredIQ has been at the forefront of these challenges by designing our Information Intelligence Platform to provide legal and IT teams with ways to automate and manage its ESI while addressing pending litigation, audit or compliance issues. Our eDiscovery, Records Management, and Governance and Compliance solutions were created to alleviate the burden of ESI while reducing cost and risk for specific applications.

Our recent eDiscovery risk assessment service for SharePoint, which was launched in March, is an example of how we’re always striving to improve our customers’ information management strategy. We understand SharePoint’s growth in enterprises with more users and databases than ever. In today’s litigious environment our eDiscovery risk assessment service delivers our customers a cost-effective and efficient way to manage and minimize their SharePoint risk by analyzing the data where it natively resides, which eliminates the need to move data to another environment for eDiscovery matters.

We are also continuing to grow as a company and are currently looking to add to our talented employee roster. Suitable candidates in marketing, administration, sales and engineering are welcome to inquire about open positions. Please visit our careers page for more information.