StoredIQ Enhances Critical Legal Hold Process with Integrated Notification and Preservation

At StoredIQ, we want to change the customer mindset to define legal hold as not just the simple act of notifying custodians to preserve relevant data, but to  see it as a holistic process that includes notification tightly coupled with the analysis, collection, and preservation of responsive data.With our enhanced Legal Hold solution, we’ve unified these traditionally disjointed components, providing a simple yet robust solution for managing the entire duty to preserve process. From notification, to tracking acknowledgement, to analyzing custodial data, and finally collection and preservation – legal and IT users gain complete control and insight into the duty to preserve process with a reliable, repeatable, and auditable solution that seamlessly integrates hold notifications with the collection and preservation of data.

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.

Doubling down on a bluff

Phil Myers, StoredIQ CEO

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?

Using Data Mapping and Assessment to Minimize eDiscovery Cost and Risk

Last week Dennis Kiker contributed an interesting article to Law Technology News entitled How To Manage ESI To Rein In Runaway Costs. At the heart of the problem is that we’re a country of corporate data hoarders. We keep data past its expiration; we don’t have a good system in place for categorizing and managing it, and are overwhelmed when a legal request necessitates identifying and collecting data relevant to a case. Dennis states:

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!