Entries categorized under “Search”

Server virtualization has effectively broken the one-to-one relationship between servers and applications, enabling more efficient use of the host's physical resources. But this is not without its drawbacks, as applications like backup software that took advantage of these idle resources no longer have access to them. (read more)

Companies who execute Information Governance plans are looking for eDiscovery products supporting Early Case Assessment (ECA). ECA is a combination of search, workflow management, information processing, and multilingual user interfaces. ECA requires a cohesive set of technology, business and data science stakeholders to select products. ECA is powerful business process, but identifying ECA products is a beleaguering task. ECA mashes together eDiscovery and technology requirements. The "mashing of requirements" creates a broad matrix of products and functionality. Without question, eDiscovery has significantly evolved within the last few years. (read more)

Evidence. It is that crucial item that can exonerate a company or subject it to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in penalties. So in today's world where organizations are occasionally tasked with sorting through mountains of data stored on tape to locate a critical piece of information to proof innocence or guilt, the difference between the right technology and the wrong is what may determine whether or not an eDiscovery job gets done. (read more)

Just how significant is today's announced technology partnership between CommVault and Informatica? Pretty big. The most obvious benefit that it provides to CommVault® Simpana® users is a new option that they can leverage to archive structured data while still managing and searching it using their Simpana software. (read more)

This week I am going to hearken back to a conference call that took place a couple of weeks ago on the morning of November 3, 2009. This is a new quarterly conference call that CommVault is sponsoring. This particular call was hosted by its Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, David West and was intended to provide some insight into CommVault's Q209 successes. But, to my surprise, Tyco Electronics' Scott Zeiders who heads its UNIX Tech Support, also joined the call and commented on Tyco's experiences with implementing CommVault® Simpana®. (read more)

Google. Yahoo! Bing. These are the search engines that people most often turn to research and find information on the Internet. But the problem with these search engines is that they make some assumptions that one cannot make when searching for data behind corporate fire walls. More specifically, when it comes to finding information within an organization, people do not even know what they need to search for so individuals almost need to be psychic when beginning their searches for this information. (read more)

More enterprise organizations are examining the possibilities of storing their data to a "cloud" and archive and backup data are heading the list of the two forms of data that they are most likely to store in the cloud. But managing these two types of data once they are in the cloud is anything but a straightforward process. Different archiving and backup software solutions create their own data silos with their own data management and retention policies. This situation can create new eDiscovery and legal hold challenges that organizations are ill-prepared to deal with. (read more)

I had a friendly, yet disturbing, conversation with an acquaintance who happens to be a local bankruptcy attorney and trustee. (Boy, how his world has changed recently.) We started off just catching up (my business - not so good; his business - unfortunately very good). The conversation then moved to a local bank that had recently been shut down by the FDIC, and how the ramifications of its failure are being felt by individuals and businesses. (read more)

Over the last few months DCIG has spent fair amount of time researching and documenting specific reasons why tape will not die. Green IT is the one reason we most often hear cited for retaining tape, though new disk-based deduplication and replication technologies coupled with new disk storage system designs that are based on grid storage architectures can offset some of those concerns. So before organizations think that after 30, 90 or 180 days that they should immediately move their archival and backup data, deduplicated or otherwise, from disk to tape just to save money, there are certain intangible savings from an eDiscovery perspective that keeping data on disk provides that are not always feasible on tape. (read more)

Data protection is top of mind with more enterprise organizations today as they look to redesign data protection. Rapidly changing economic forces, new technologies and steadily growing volumes of data are prompting enterprises to rethink how they can best protect, manage and recover their data by leveraging these new technologies without introducing new people or extraordinary costs to accomplish these objectives. To get Symantec's take on these new challenges facing organizations, DCIG lead analyst, Jerome Wendt, recently met with Deepak Mohan, Symantec's senior vice president of the Data Protection Group, to discuss these topics. (read more)

Today's release of CommVault Simpana 8 continues to reflect CommVault's commitment to deliver enterprise data protection and management using a single product with multiple application modules. Yet it is Simpana 8's new global block-based data deduplication feature and new ability to deduplicate data stored to tape that is likely to raise excitement. Making these features integral to Simpana 8, CommVault does more than just give enterprises another deduplication option or simply lower tape costs. Instead it starts to put CommVault on a collision course with deduplicating storage appliances and even traditional tape devices while giving organizations new reason to ponder their longer term deduplication strategy. (read more)

Responding to an eDiscovery request is definitely not a task that most enterprise organizations eagerly anticipate. But the pain of an eDiscovery is often a result of poorly written or non-existent internal policies and procedures. An organization that takes the time to put internal policies and procedures in place may not only avoid this scenario but also lower its overall cost of doing an eDiscovery. (read more)

A SearchStorageChannel.com article that appeared in early 2008 estimated the cost of outsourced eDiscovery at about $1500 per gigabyte. While those costs may sound high, they are justifiable when a company factors in the need for qualified personnel to search, access and retrieve data securely and authoritatively as part a legal eDiscovery. However these same costs can quickly become untenable for enterprise companies that need to access and search terabytes if not petabytes of information. Therefore it is not surprising that more enterprise companies are exploring the option of performing eDiscoveries in-house to minimize these litigation costs. (read more)

Under the Federal Records Act each federal agency, with help from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is required to maintain records that document their organization, functions, policies and activities. It is explicitly noted that Federal records should not be destroyed except when in accordance with the procedures described in Chapter 33 of Title 44, United States Code. Recently, in the Washington Post, we find out that not only does the White House lack a comprehensive email archiving solution but past solutions have been riddled with numerous record-keeping problems: (read more)

It all comes down to a vision of an underlying technology platform that dramatically changes the way in which we interact with information and computers: where computers adapt to our world rather than the other way around. Because we use a Meaning Based Computing platform, our technology enables people to interact with information ideas and understand their relationships to each other, no matter how they are expressed and no matter what the format. Based on that understanding, Autonomy's solutions process information and perform sophisticated analysis operations that provide a tremendous advantage in overcoming the challenges of managing electronic data for eDiscovery, information & records management, and compliance. Corporations want a single platform and a single vendor to rely on to minimize the footprint in the organization and to build a partnership with, they do not want to run a hundred searches with a hundred different platforms, even though they may have more than a hundred different varieties of ESI. (read more)

To help eliminate these problems, many organizations turn to email archiving. But not all archiving solutions are created equal. For instance, stubbing is often a key component of the email archiving solution. With stubbing, a pointer is kept in the email server, such as Microsoft Exchange, while the original message and/or attachments is moved off to an archive area. When a user wants to look at an email, the stub is accessed, and then message is retrieved from archive with the expected benefit of a reduced mailbox size. Unfortunately eliminating the problem of mailbox size often opens the door to stubbing issues. Over time, stubs can actually cause performance problems as the number of items kept (messages, including stubs) increases. As a result, stubbing becomes a band-aid that does nothing to mitigate the growing email problem. (read more)

There are many more enterprise applications that can be dual purposed for eDiscovery and business benefits. Desktop search can help users find and designate ESI. Firewall and spam systems can actually be used to collect IM conversations. Content Management Systems expand the potential search/preservation criteria and can decrease the potential volume of ESI by enabling active expiry of unnecessary items. The important thing is to think beyond point solutions and bring legal, business and IT to the table to extract the greatest value from the 'cost of doing business' in America. (read more)

Email and other electronic communications are defacto business records and public agencies must take steps to preserve and give access to government records or face the consequences. (read more)

The recent Quon v. Arch Wireless decision has raised many questions about a company's ability and right to monitor employee communications. Fortunately, a deeper read shows that the real issues centered around the employee's reasonable expectation of privacy, which a well documented and communicated policy solves handily. So an employee might ask, "I know that the company owns my email, but do they really read it?" (read more)

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the 'secondary benefits' of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality. (read more)

One of the hardest things in a HR investigation is to disprove false accusations of sexual harassment, inappropriate content, fixed bids and many other scenarios. It is very easy to fake printed out email and IM conversations that would not stand up to close scrutiny if still in electronic form. The only way to prove that someone did not send a message is to have all the messages within that time frame and the ability to retrieve them. Think about how hard it is to set the context for an off-color email without having the complete historical conversations between a supervisor and a former employee. (read more)

Enterprise level discovery requires enterprise level technology or by definition it becomes 'unduly burdensome' for any but the smallest cases. Recent opinions from federal judges and appellate courts on both coasts have made it clear that the discovery process, technology and personnel are under increasing scrutiny. Plaintiff's counsel are reading the same opinions from Judge John Facciola (United States v. O'Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14 (D.D.C. 2008)) and the 9th Circuit (Quon v. Arch Wireless). Many will interpret them as a signal to initiate Daubert style hearings to force corporations to defend their search engines, communication systems and the discovery effort in response to discovery demands. (read more)

Deduplication is currently one of the hottest topics in data protection but it takes more than one form. The CommVault® Simpana® software suite implements deduplication as a Single Instance Store (SIS). In this iteration, SIS deduplicates archived and backed up files at the file level and then only stores one occurrence of the file. In part 2 of this interview series with CommVault Systems' Senior Director of Information Access and Management, Simon Taylor, elaborates on how Simpana leverages SIS for information search and data mobility as well as how this approach complements block-based deduplication approaches found on certain disk-based storage solutions. (read more)

The 9th Circuit of Appeals reversed a district court ruling, Quon v. Arch Wireless, in which a wireless text messaging service turned over message transcripts to their customer, the Ontario Police Department, during an investigation on an officer's excessive use of the department provided pager. The fact pattern has some twists and turns, but buried within the opinion are issues that are worth exploring for every corporation contemplating out-sourcing their communications via SaaS or other external provider. (read more)

There is a growing perception among those who are intimately involved with information management that the discipline of information management is changing. The fact that it is changing comes as no surprise to anyone as everyone knows that a change has to occur. The question is, "Is this just an evolutionary change or is a paradigm shift in information management about to occur?" (read more)