Category Archives: GDPR

November 19, 2024 · 11:47 AM

Industry Experts Address Information Governance Challenges in Microsoft 365

By John Patzakis

Successful information governance in a Microsoft 365 environment can be extremely challenging. Organizations require ways to operationalize their compliance processes, in order to effectively address their information governance use cases, such as PCI compliance, ROT, Data separation, and GDPR. However, Microsoft’s Purview eDiscovery platform is a very expensive add-on to M365 that does not scale to the data throughput requirements of a typical information governance project.

This is because M365 is a massive data ocean that is not purpose-built for compliance and eDiscovery, and so a new “compliance index” must be created with data carved out of the M365 ocean to initiate an eDiscovery or compliance case in Purview eDiscovery to ensure proper and complete content indexing. As a result of this disjointed two-step process, users are encountering significant problems with low throughput and defensibility. Many customers report to us that Microsoft Purview Premium’s documented inability  to handle anything other than small matters due to their 2GB per hour throughput limit. A matter involving 100 custodians at 10GB of M365 data would take several weeks to complete with Microsoft Purview Premium.

Last week X1 hosted a webinar with industry leaders Randy Kahn and Chas Meier to discuss information governance challenges in an M365 environment. Kahn outlined information governance principles and priorities in general and then emphasized how technical automation is essential to enforce and execute on any implemented information governance policies and procedures.

Kahn’s overview segued into Meier’s discussion and demonstration on how the X1 Enterprise Platform is the best solution available for managing M365 data sources as well as on-premises sources like laptops and file shares. Meier highlighted recent case studies involving large-scale projects where X1 was able to search and analyze terabytes of M365 information very accurately and in a fraction of the time required for other means, including Microsoft Purview.

Meier explained how the X1 Enterprise platform’s unique architecture allows it to index nearly ten times the daily volume compared to Purview or other competitive “connector” technologies. X1’s patented distributed micro-index-in-place architecture, combined with horizontal scaling, makes X1 the only solution capable of handling rapid indexing, identification, searching, and remediation of massive data sets in the terabytes across M365 sources, including modern attachments and inactive mailboxes. Additionally, X1 effectively addresses both cloud and on-premises data sources in a unified manner, including distributed endpoints, network file shares, and multiple M365 services like Mail, OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint.

A copy of the webinar recording can be accessed HERE.

For companies navigating complex information governance and eDiscovery requirements, including those involving M365, the  X1 Enterprise Platform ensures compliance while protecting privacy. By implementing X1 Enterprise, organizations can not only reduce costs and save valuable time but also gain a strategic advantage in managing their information governance needs. We invite you to explore how X1 can transform your data management processes and help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

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Filed under Best Practices, Corporations, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Governance, m365, Preservation & Collection

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September 28, 2021 · 10:51 AM

Dark Data is an Unmet Cyber Security Challenge

By John Patzakis

Enterprises today are creating and storing massive volumes of unstructured, data distributed across the enterprise at a very fast pace. IT experts refer to this data type as “dark data.” Research advisory firm Gartner defines dark data as “the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes.” according to Rahul Telang, professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University, “[o]ver 90% of the data in business is dark data.”

Dark data exists due to organizational silos and a highly distributed and mobile workforce, a trend that proliferated during the COVID pandemic and has now solidified as the new normal. As a result, there is a proliferation of unmanaged data stored in file shares, laptops, unarchived email accounts, shared cloud drives such as OneDrive and Dropbox and many other repositories. According to Anthony Juliano, CTO of Landmark Ventures, “dark data is exploding rapidly with the dissolution of the perimeter; it’s a largely unaddressed risk vector. A vast majority of the CIOs and CISOs I speak with are now prioritizing solving this problem not only going forward, but also backwards – and it’s not easy.”

Cyber security platforms generally have a good handle on perimeter integrity, encryption, and other key priorities such as zero day network attacks and malware. However, while these measures are clearly important, distributed dark data is largely a blind spot for cybersecurity tech, and as such organizations have very little visibility into the content of such data. GDPR, CCPA and other recent privacy regulatory requirements add increased urgency to this challenge.

CISOs and legal and compliance executives often aspire to implement information governance and security programs like defensible deletion, data migration, and data audits across their unstructured data to detect risks and remediate non-compliance. However, without an actual and scalable technology platform to effectuate these goals, those aspirations remain just that.

One tactic attempted by some CIOs to attempt to address this daunting challenge is to periodically migrate disparate data from around the global enterprise into a central location, such as an archiving platform. But boiling the ocean through data migration and centralization is extremely expensive, highly disruptive, and frankly unworkable for numerous reasons. While such a concept may seem like a good idea when drawn up on the whiteboard, originations quickly learn that you cannot just migrate hundreds of terabytes of distributed dark data to an archive, mainly due to network bandwidth and other logistical constraints, as well as the reality that you are merely copying and duplicating the data being migrated, which actually makes the situation worse.

Another tactic is data loss prevention (DLP). Again, this approach is thwarted by the new normal of a distributed, global workforce. Additionally, DLP tools are traditionally hampered by an inability to have deep content insight to unstructured data, resulting in false positives, inaccurate classification and unacceptable disruption to employee and business workflows.

What has always been needed is gaining immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise in-place, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints, file shares and other unstructured data sources, and return results within minutes instead of days or weeks. None of the other approaches outlined above come close to meeting this requirement and in fact actually perpetuate information security and governance failures.

Born and bred to address global eDiscovery challenges, X1 Enterprise platform (X1E) represents a unique approach to dark data, by enabling enterprises to quickly and easily search across multiple distributed endpoints and data servers in place through a true distributed, parallelized computing architecture. Legal, security and compliance teams can easily perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, instead of days or weeks. With X1E, organizations can also automatically migrate, collect, or take other action on the data as a result of the search parameters. Built on our award-winning and patented X1 Search technology, X1E is the first product to offer true and massively scalable distributed searching that is executed in its entirety on the end-node computers for data audits across an organization. This game-changing capability vastly reduces costs while greatly mitigating risk and disruption to operations.

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Filed under CaCPA, Cyber security, eDiscovery & Compliance, GDPR, Information Governance, Information Management

September 8, 2021 · 11:28 AM

eDiscovery Services Are Undergoing a Major Transformation

By John Patzakis

Recent research from industry analyst Greg Buckles at the eDiscovery Journal highlights soaring valuations for eDiscovery tech firms.  For the first time in the history of the industry, multiple eDiscovery tech firms have gone public in a single year, and by my count, there are at least seven tech “Unicorns” (a company with at least a billion dollar valuation) in the space. Relativity leads the way with at least a $3.6 billion valuation based upon their latest financing.

Yet while technology-based providers are seeing escalating valuations, valuations and M&A activity for pure services firms are conversely softening. This is because tech automation is finally catching up to this space. Traditional eDiscovery services typically involve manual collection, followed by manual on-premise hardware-based processing, and finally manual upload to review. These inefficiencies extend projects by often weeks while dramatically increasing cost and risk with many manual data handoffs. However, the first half of the EDRM involving collection and processing are now far more automated than they were even a few years ago. For instance, the one aspect of eDiscovery tech that is actually seeing decreasing usage and revenues are standalone processing appliances. This is because these tools are dependent upon the efficient manual services model prior to ingestion and also post import.

However, the latest in eDiscovery collection technologies will now combine targeted collection with previously manual processing steps that are performed “on the fly” and in the background so that the data is automatically collected, processed and uploaded into a review platform such as Relativity in one fell swoop. Better yet, processing is now free with RelativityOne. The automation Relativity is engineering, including with their integration with X1, along with innovations by other review platforms, is rendering traditional eDiscovery processing tech obsolete, along with manual collection and processing services. The purchasers of eDiscovery services and software have clearly noticed and are demanding adaptation from vendors.  

So how can services firms adapt to the inevitable? Here are few strategies:

First, services firms should move upstream to focus on information governance and privacy consulting. The new generation of eDiscovery technology enables convergence with privacy (i.e. GDPR compliance) information security and many other information governance use cases. This convergence requires high-end strategic consulting to bring these processes together and operationalize them. This also enables services firms to develop direct and ongoing relationships with corporate law departments, IT and other key corporate stakeholders.

Second, data analytics consulting, which is already a prominent offering by many firms, is ripe for further expansion. This is because analytics for eDiscovery is becoming more advanced and user friendly, and thus is able to be applied across the eDiscovery workflow, including pre-collection analytics and information governance.

Third, services firms should find ways to develop or otherwise acquire their own differentiating tech or establish meaningful partnerships with tech platform providers. These partnerships should entail more than merely using the software, but the development of proprietary workflows or even technical integrations that enable unique service offerings.

At the end of the day, eDiscovery is a technical process that is subject to technology disruption just like any other technology-based services industry. eDiscovery services firms that not only adapt to but embrace this change as a strategic opportunity will be the ones who prosper the most.

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, GDPR, Information Governance, Preservation & Collection, Uncategorized

January 27, 2021 · 10:28 AM

Architecting a New Paradigm in Legal Governance

By Michael Rasmussen

Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a guest blog post from Michael Rasmussen, the GRC Pundit & Analyst at GRC 20/20 Research, LLC.

Exponential growth and change in business strategy, risks, regulations, globalization, distributed operations, competitive velocity, technology, and business data encumbers organizations of all sizes. Gone are the years of simplicity in business operations.

Managing the complexity of business from a legal and privacy perspective, governing information that is pervasive throughout the organization, and keeping continuous business and legal change in sync is a significant challenge for boards, executives, as well as the legal professionals in the legal department. Organizations need an integrated strategy, process, information, and technology architecture to govern legal, meet legal commitments, and manage legal uncertainty and risk in a way that is efficient, effective, and agile and extends into the broader enterprise GRC architecture.

In my previous blog, Operationalizing GRC in Context of Legal & Privacy: The Last Mile of GRC, I began this discussion, and here I aim to expound on it further from a legal context.

Legal today is more than legal matters, actions, and contracts. Today’s legal organization has to respond to incident/breach reporting and notification laws in a timely and compliant manner, respond to Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR), harmonize and monitor retentions obligations, conduct eDiscovery, manage legal holds on data, and continuously monitor regulations and legislation and apply them to a business context.

In today’s global business environment, a broad spectrum of economic, political, social, legal, and regulatory changes are continually bombarding the organization. The organization continues to see exponential growth of regulatory requirements and legal obligations (often conflicting and overlapping) that must be met, which multiply as the organization expands global operations, products, and services. This requires an integrated approach to legal governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) with a goal to reliably achieve objectives while addressing uncertainty and act with integrity.[1] This includes adherence to mandatory legal requirements and voluntary organizational values and the boundaries each organization establishes. The legal department, with responsibility for understanding matter management, issue identification, investigations, policy management, reporting and filing, legal risk, and the regulatory obligations faced by the organization, is a critical player in GRC (what is understood as Enterprise or Integrated GRC), as well as improving GRC within the legal function itself.

A successful legal management information architecture will be able to connect information across risk management and business systems. This requires a robust and adaptable legal information architecture that can model the complexity of legal information, discovery, transactions, interactions, relationship, cause and effect, and the analysis of information, which can integrate and manage a range of business systems and external data. Key to this information architecture is a clear data inventory and map of information that informs the organization of what data it has, who in the organization owns it, what regulatory retention obligations are attached to it, and what third parties have access to it. This is a fundamental requirement for applying process and effectively operationalizing an organization’s GRC activities, as detailed in the previous blog.

There can and should be an integrated technology architecture that extends GRC technology and operationalizes it in a legal and privacy context. This connects the fabric of the legal processes, information, discovery, and other technologies together across the organization. This is a hub of operationalizing GRC and requires that it be able to integrate and connect with a variety of other business systems, such as specialized legal discovery solutions and integrate with broader enterprise GRC technology.

The right technology architecture choice for an organization involves the integration of several components into a core enterprise GRC and Legal GRC architecture – which can facilitate the integration and correlation of legal information, discovery, analytics, and reporting. Organizations suffer when they take a myopic view of GRC technology that fails to connect all the dots and provide context to discovery, business analytics, objectives, and strategy in the real-time that a business operates in. 

Extending and operationalizing GRC processes and technology in context of legal and privacy enables the organization to use its resources wisely to prevent undesirable outcomes and maximize advantages while striving to achieve its objectives. A key focus is to provide legal assurance that processes are designed to mitigate the most significant legal issues and are operating as designed. Effective management of legal risk and exposure is critical to the board and executive management, who need a reliable way to provide assurance to stakeholders that the enterprise plans to both preserve and create value. Mature GRC enables the organization to weigh multiple inputs from both internal and external contexts and use a variety of methods to analyze legal risk and provide analytics and modeling.

[1] This is the OCEG definition of GRC.

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Filed under Best Practices, CaCPA, eDiscovery & Compliance, GDPR, Information Governance, Information Management, Uncategorized

December 22, 2020 · 11:14 AM

Operationalizing GRC in Context of Legal & Privacy: The Last Mile of GRC

By Michael Rasmussen

Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a guest blog post from Michael Rasmussen, the GRC Pundit & Analyst at GRC 20/20 Research, LLC.

At its core, GRC is the capability to reliably achieve objectives [GOVERNANCE], address uncertainty [RISK MANAGEMENT], and act with integrity [COMPLIANCE]. GRC is something organizations do, not something they purchase. They govern, they manage risk, and they comply with obligations. However, there is technology to enable GRC related processes, such as legal and privacy, to be more efficient, effective, and agile.

However, too often the focus on GRC technology is limited to the process management of forms, workflow, tasks, and reporting. These are critical and important elements, but the role of technology for GRC is so much broader to operationalize GRC activities that are labor intensive, particularly in the context of legal and privacy. Simply managing forms, workflow, and tasks are no longer enough. Organizations need to start thinking how they can integrate eDiscovery and data/information governance solutions within their core GRC architecture.

What is needed is the ability to search, find, monitor, interact, and control data throughout the business environment. GRC platforms are excellent at managing forms, workflow, tasks, analytics, and reporting. But behind the scenes there are still labor-intensive tasks or disconnected solutions that actually find, control, and assess the disposition of sensitive data in the enterprise. eDiscovery and information governance solutions have been disconnected and not strategically leveraged for GRC purposes. Together, the core GRC platform that integrates with eDiscovery and information governance technologies builds exponential economies in efficiency, effectiveness, and agility.

Specifically, an integrated GRC solution that weds the core GRC platform with eDiscovery and information governance technology delivers full value to an organization that:

  • Discovers the attributes and metadata of data no matter where it lives within the environment as a key component of GRC processes for legal and privacy compliance.
  • Enables 360° awareness to assessments by discovering the information needed to conduct and deliver assessments effectively into the core GRC platform.
  • Delivers a centralized console to interact with data/information and metadata of files on devices across the organization (such as network file shares, OneDrive, and Dropbox data).
  • Automates the ability to interact with downstream endpoints/systems to provide the ability to search the content of records for keywords and perform analysis using regular expressions and classifiers.
  • Controls data wherever it is with the ability to get to the data and analyze it from a centralized console.

An integrated approach that brings together the core GRC platform with eDiscovery and information governance technology enables the organization to discover, manage, monitor, and control data right from the central GRC platform console. It enables the organization to get centralized and accessible insight into where sensitive information is, how it is being used, and what can be done with it.

  • For example. Within the GRC platform I can initiate a search based on key words or patterns (e.g., social security number). The eDiscovery/information governance solution then finds where that information is throughout the enterprise and delivers a list of records back to the GRC platform for analysis and monitoring.

This enables an integrated GRC architecture that brings 360° contextual awareness into information across the enterprise. It delivers enhanced efficiency in time saved and money saved chasing information through disconnected solutions and processes, it provides greater effectiveness through insight and control of information and enables greater agility across a dynamic environment to be responsive to issues of information governance. Together, a GRC platform with eDiscovery/information governance capabilities enables and delivers more complete and accurate data governance and privacy assessments, integrated findings, with the ability to manage remediation tasks from one central place.

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Filed under Best Practices, CaCPA, Data Audit, eDiscovery & Compliance, GDPR, Information Governance, Information Management