Category Archives: Information Access

Bringing AI to the Data: How X1 Search v11 Redefines Secure Enterprise Search

By John Patzakis

At X1, we believe the future of enterprise AI depends on a simple but often overlooked principle: data should not have to move in order to become intelligent. With the launch of X1 Search v11, we are introducing a fundamentally different approach—one that embeds AI directly into our index-in-place architecture. Rather than forcing organizations to centralize and copy their data into external platforms, we enable AI to operate exactly where that data already lives. You can read the full press release here: https://www.x1.com/x1-introduces-ai-powered-x1-search-delivering-secure-ai-in-place-for-individual-and-enterprise-users/

This release represents an important milestone for us and for our customers. As Chas Meier noted, “X1 Search v11 marks an important milestone in how organizations can safely apply AI…without compromising the security controls enterprise environments demand.” That statement reflects our core design philosophy: AI must adapt to enterprise security, compliance, and governance requirements—not the other way around.

With X1 Search v11, we are delivering AI capabilities directly within our micro-index. That means organizations can apply advanced intelligence—classification, categorization, and contextual analysis—across emails, files, and collaboration data without ever relocating that information. Everything happens in place, within existing security boundaries, whether on endpoints or across enterprise systems.

For large enterprises, this architecture unlocks an even more powerful capability: the ability to deploy their own trained and curated large language models directly into the X1 index. Instead of relying solely on generic, hosted AI services, organizations can operationalize models tailored to their data that reflect their internal policies, regulatory requirements, and business workflows. These models run directly against their data, in place, delivering highly relevant and controlled outcomes.

This approach stands in sharp contrast to traditional hosted AI platforms. In those models, organizations must copy and transfer massive amounts of sensitive data into third-party hosted AI platforms before any meaningful analysis can occur. That process introduces serious risks. Moving data to outside providers complicates compliance, potentially compromises IP, and creates new attack surfaces that most enterprises simply cannot accept.

Beyond security concerns, the traditional model also breaks down operationally at scale. Enterprises are not dealing with small data sets; they are managing dozens of terabytes of distributed, unstructured data. Attempting to duplicate and transfer that volume is not just costly; it is infeasible. The result is delays, fragmentation, and incomplete analysis—undermining the very promise of AI.

We have taken a different path. By bringing AI to the data through our distributed micro-indexing technology, we eliminate the need for data movement entirely. Models can be deployed directly to where data resides, enabling real-time analysis while preserving security, reducing infrastructure overhead, and scaling seamlessly across the enterprise.

We see X1 Search v11 as more than a product release—it is a shift in how enterprise AI is deployed. Organizations no longer have to choose between innovation and control. With AI in place, they can achieve both.

To see this in action, we invite you to join our upcoming live product tour on Thursday, April 23, providing a guided walkthrough of the new AI-enriched capabilities and flexible model deployment features.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Desktop Search, Enterprise AI, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Google Workspace, Information Access, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, X1 Search 11

X1 Achieves Record Growth as Numerous Fortune 500 Companies Standardize on X1 Enterprise

By Larry Gill

X1 Discovery is having a record-breaking year, with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and leading law firms adopting the X1 Enterprise Platform to transform how they approach eDiscovery collection, early case assessment, and information governance. In an era when overcollection and skyrocketing legal costs strain corporate budgets, these organizations are choosing X1 to gain immediate insight into their data, dramatically reduce costs, and ensure defensible, repeatable processes—all while maintaining complete control over their information. This surge in adoption reflects X1’s position as the industry’s trusted solution for modern, efficient, and targeted enterprise eDiscovery.

The X1 Enterprise Platform is an industry-leading eDiscovery and information governance solution that empowers organizations to search, identify, analyze, and act on their data in-place, wherever it resides. X1 uniquely addresses Microsoft 365—including robust Teams support—laptops, file servers, and other cloud and on-premises sources, giving legal and compliance teams unparalleled reach and control. Dozens of major enterprises and AM Law 100 firms have now standardized on X1, recognizing it as the most effective solution for managing M365 content—often outperforming even Purview Premium—while also covering on-premises data sources seamlessly. By enabling a highly targeted, efficient, index-in-place approach, X1 provides immediate, pre-collection visibility, streamlining search, analysis, remediation, and collection workflows like never before.

Here are the top three reasons why leading organizations are adopting X1 Enterprise in record numbers:

  1. Significant Return on Investment
    Corporate legal departments that implement X1 consistently realize up to 90% in “hard” cost savings. X1’s powerful in-place search and pre-collection filtering enable teams to collect only what is needed, achieve true proportionality, and eliminate massive outsourced processing and project management fees. Many organizations are even scaling back or eliminating costly Purview Premium licenses altogether, all while mitigating risk with a defensible and repeatable collection process.
  2. Unmatched Speed and Scalability
    X1 delivers speed and scalability that no other solution can match. It can search across thousands of laptops and multiple terabytes of M365 or file share data within minutes, quickly pinpointing responsive data for precise collection or remediation. All indexed data stays securely behind the corporate firewall or in a private cloud. Unlike legacy tools that overpromise and underdeliver, X1 is proven to work and scale as advertised, backed by real-world case studies and customer success stories.
  3. Multiple Use Cases Beyond eDiscovery
    Beyond eDiscovery, corporate legal and compliance teams leverage X1 to locate and remediate sensitive personal information (PII), defensibly purge redundant or non-compliant data, support due diligence and data separation during M&A transactions, and handle GDPR Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) and other data privacy obligations—making X1 a true multipurpose platform for enterprise information governance.

In today’s data-driven world, X1 Enterprise is more than a solution—it’s a strategic advantage. For organizations serious about controlling eDiscovery costs, reducing risk, and gaining immediate insight into their data, X1 is the clear choice.

Interested in learning more about how to dramatically reduce your costs and compliance risks? Schedule a briefing today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Authentication, Cloud Data, Corporations, Cybersecurity, Data Audit, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Access, Information Governance, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, Preservation & Collection, SharePoint

Modernizing eDiscovery: A Huge Strategic Win for Legal Operations Executives

By John Patzakis

Modern In-Place Data Discovery

For today’s corporate legal departments, controlling runaway costs is no longer optional — it’s a mandate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the spiraling expenses for outsourced eDiscovery and information governance services. While litigation and regulatory demands continue to grow, many organizations still rely heavily on costly outside service providers to identify, collect, process, and produce electronically stored information (ESI). This outdated model drains budgets, strains timelines, and introduces unnecessary risk.

Enter the modern legal operations executive. One of their core responsibilities is to identify inefficiencies and leverage technology to reduce costs and streamline workflows. Modernizing eDiscovery and information governance processes is a very fertile and high-impact opportunity to do exactly that. Doing so can save organizations tens of millions of dollars in hard (actual) costs. Here’s how:

1) Bring eDiscovery In-House and Slash Costs with the Right Technology

Outsourced eDiscovery vendors typically charge steep hourly rates and volume-based markups for even routine tasks like identifying and collecting custodial data. Yet studies — and real-world case studies — consistently show that corporations can reduce eDiscovery costs by up to 90% by adopting targeted collection and in-place search technology.

Solutions like X1 Enterprise enable legal and compliance teams to index and search data in place — without cumbersome, time-consuming manual collection. By deploying this technology internally, the legal operations team can replace costly third-party workflows, including highly inefficient Microsoft 365 processes, with faster, defensible, and far less expensive processes. This means greater control over timelines and budgets, and reduced exposure to data security risks associated with handing over large volumes of sensitive information to multiple vendors.

2) Drive Broader Efficiencies Beyond Litigation

The benefits of a modern eDiscovery platform extend far beyond document production in a lawsuit. The same technology can be leveraged for critical information governance and data compliance functions. For example, when a company needs to respond to internal audits, regulatory data access requests, or data privacy audits and inquiries, in-place search capabilities allow teams to quickly find and manage relevant data without reinventing the wheel each time.

Legal operations executives can champion the use of enterprise eDiscovery tools for these broader use cases, creating synergies between compliance, privacy, IT, and legal teams. This not only reduces redundant spending on separate point solutions but also ensures better control of data and improved risk management across the organization.

3) Partner with Finance to Uncover Hidden Cost Savings

A key role of legal operations is to align legal spend with broader corporate financial goals. When evaluating an in-house eDiscovery solution, legal ops leaders should engage their CFO early. One common pitfall is focusing solely on capital IT budgets while overlooking how much is siphoned away from the legal operating budget to fund expensive outsourced eDiscovery services.

In one real-world example, a company assumed they could not afford an internal solution based on their limited IT budget. However, when they worked with their CFO to analyze total eDiscovery spending, they discovered they were paying tens of millions annually from a separate operating budget to outside providers. Redirecting even a fraction of this spend towards a robust internal platform not only paid for the technology but will yield millions in net savings — year after year.

Final Thoughts

For legal operations executives looking to deliver immediate cost savings, increase efficiency, and elevate the department’s strategic value, modernizing eDiscovery and information governance processes is perhaps their greatest opportunity for an immediate and significant impact. By bringing the process in-house with proven technology like X1 Enterprise, expanding its use to multiple compliance and governance scenarios, and partnering with finance to eliminate wasteful spending, legal operations can transform eDiscovery and information governance from a financial drain into a model of operational excellence.

Interested in learning more about how to achieve this transformation? Schedule a briefing today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

X1 Enterprise Is the Gold Standard for Data Separation in M&A Matters

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

X1 is the Gold Standard in Data Separation

Corporate mergers and acquisitions are complex enough on their own — but when a deal involves the divestiture of an entire business unit or a carve-out of specific departments, the stakes for separating data correctly and efficiently become even higher. Legal and IT teams must identify and surgically separate emails, documents, and other unstructured electronic information to ensure that the right data goes to the acquiring party — and that what must be retained remains secure and compliant with privacy and legal requirements.

This data separation exercise is notorious for being time-consuming, extremely expensive, and highly disruptive. This is because traditional methods require heavy lifting by IT teams and service providers, endless back-and-forth with custodians, and mass data collections that literally double the risk. Worse yet, Microsoft Purview, with its known throttling and low throughput challenges for M 365 data, is not up to the task for data separation matters that invariably involve at least dozens of terabytes. These inefficiencies all lead to severe regulatory risks, runaway costs, and critical delays.

There is, however, a far better way — X1 Enterprise. Several major corporations have recently employed X1 Enterprise in high-stakes data separation matters. Once completed, the comments from our customers are the same: There was no other way they could have done it without spending millions of dollars on time-consuming and disruptive services.

Data Separation Is Not Just Another eDiscovery Project

Unlike standard eDiscovery, a divestiture-driven data separation project must carve out large volumes of live, operational data while the business continues to run. Legacy tools and processes require copying and moving the entire subject data set to a separate repository for indexing and searching — adding huge costs, time delays, and operational risk.

X1 Enterprise’s game-changing advantage lies in its distributed micro-indexing architecture and true index-in-place capability. This unique approach allows organizations to instantly search, categorize, and separate or otherwise remediate massive volumes of data where it resides — without duplicating and exporting entire data sets to third-party servers for processing.

In practical terms, this means:

Lightning-Fast Search: X1 Enterprise creates lightweight, local micro-indexes on endpoints and servers across the organization. Search results come back in seconds, no matter where the data lives — on laptops, file shares, or cloud repositories such as M365.

Minimal Disruption: Because the data stays in place, there is no need to duplicate or move sensitive content, minimizing the risk of data leakage, avoiding the bottlenecks that come with data copying and migration for centralized processing, and enabling the actual remediation to be infinitely more effective by working on the live data set. How do you execute data separation when you are working off a stale copy of the data for the categorization effort? The short answer: Up to millions of dollars in manual services to go back to the “original data” and manually separate the data for each employee and their respective data sources.

Scalability and Control: Whether the divestiture involves hundreds or thousands of custodians across geographies, X1 Enterprise scales seamlessly while giving legal and IT teams centralized control and real-time oversight.

Defensible Process: Legal teams can generate audit trails, reports, and logs to demonstrate a precise and defensible chain of custody, which is critical for regulatory and contractual compliance.

The Bottom Line: Much Faster, with Dramatically less Cost and Risk.

When time is money — and delays can put entire deals at risk — organizations cannot afford cumbersome, legacy eDiscovery workflows for carve-out data separation projects. X1 Enterprise’s innovative architecture empowers legal, compliance, and IT teams to execute precise data separations faster, with dramatically lower cost and business impact.

For any organization facing a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, X1 Enterprise is not just an upgrade — it is the modern standard for high-stakes data separation and governance.

Learn more about how X1 Enterprise can streamline your next M&A project. Schedule a demo today at sales@x1.com or visit  www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Study, Cloud Data, compliance, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

Microsoft Copilot Explains Why X1 Search is Far Better than Windows Search

By Chas Meier

We’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI chat bot. So, we asked Copilot the following prompt:

“Is X1 Search better than the standard Windows Search?

Here is Copilot’s reply in full:

“Yes, X1 Search offers many advantages over standard Windows Search, especially if you’re dealing with large volumes of documents and emails. It integrates with multiple data sources, provides faster and more efficient searches, and offers advanced filtering and preview options that standard Windows Search lacks. For someone in your line of work, X1 Search could be a real game-changer.”

Intrigued, we explored further:

“What are the advantages of X1 search over standard Windows search?

Copilot:

“Great question! Here are some key advantages of X1 Search over standard Windows Search:

  1. Unified Search Across Multiple Data Sources: X1 Search can search across emails, documents, local files, cloud storage (like Google Drive, OneDrive, Box), and even archived emails. Windows Search, on the other hand, is limited to your local files and doesn’t integrate as seamlessly with cloud services.
  2. Speed and Efficiency: X1 Search uses advanced indexing and fast-as-you-type search capabilities, allowing you to find information almost instantly. Windows Search can be slower, especially when dealing with large volumes of data.
  3. Advanced Filtering and Preview Options: X1 Search offers powerful filtering options, keyword highlighting, and full fidelity previews of documents and emails without needing to open them fully. This makes it easier to quickly identify relevant information. Windows Search lacks these advanced features.
  4. Integration with Email and Collaboration Tools: X1 Search integrates deeply with email clients like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, allowing you to search through emails, attachments, chats, and more. Windows Search doesn’t offer this level of integration.
  5. Cloud Data Search: X1 Search can index and search data stored in cloud repositories like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box, which Windows Search doesn’t support.
  6. User Friendly Interface: X1 Search provides a simple, unified interface with over 50 refine columns, making it easy to navigate and find exactly what you need. Windows Search’s interface is more basic and less intuitive.

Does this help clarify the advantages for you?”

Yes, it does! Thank you, Microsoft Copilot! We could not have said it any better.

X1 Search is available for individual purchase on the X1 website and large volume, enterprise purchase by contacting X1 at sales@x1.com. To learn more about X1 Search visit  www.x1.com/solutions/x1-search.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Desktop Search, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Google Workspace, Hybrid Search, Information Access, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, SharePoint, X1 Search 9