Category Archives: Records Management

April 9, 2024 · 10:53 AM

New X1 Search 9 Provides the Best Means to Search Your Microsoft 365 Data Sources

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

Last week X1 announced major new, robust features to our desktop productivity solution X1 Search. The next generation of X1 Search is no longer desktop-only focused, but instead provides a revolutionary ability to instantly search across your Microsoft email, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint as well as your local files and email all in a single unified search. This powerful capability supercharges your productivity, thereby saving hours a day. This added support also extends to Google Drive and Gmail.

While there are many innovations with X1 Search 9, the ability to search across all your M365 data sources with a single search is particularly game changing. No other enterprise or desktop search solution can match this functionality. The native Microsoft M365 search has a semblance of this, offering only a few search results displayed with a cursory preview, as opposed to full search results and full fidelity preview provided by X1.

“X1 Search is my go-to, must-have search application on my desktop,” said Max Underwood, long-time business and personal user from a large defense contracting firm. “Nothing even comes close to matching X1 Search’s speed and accuracy in finding what I am looking for exactly when I need it so I can get back to work, whether the source file is located on my local drive or hosted on a distant cloud via my company’s network. It’s an incredible time-saver, invaluable, way ahead of Windows Search or any other search tool I’ve seen – literally saving me hours each work week. X1 Search is essential to my day-to-day operations, and with the new ability to instantly search across all my Teams messages and accelerate my Gmail search on top of the current capabilities, the solution is even more compelling.”

No other solution enables you to instantly search across all your core data applications using a single prompt and return immediate results with hit highlighting and full fidelity preview capabilities. X1 Search unlocks the ability to find information no matter where it resides whether it’s lost in your spam folder, archived in your email 10 years ago, buried in a Teams chat or recently added to your OneDrive or SharePoint. X1 Search does the work for you, faster and far better than any other desktop or enterprise search offering.

The new X1 Search version 9 capabilities, include the following benefits:

• The ability to search through all your Microsoft Teams Chats and Channels history, including messages, attachments, emojis, reactions, and more, all from a single interface.
• Elevate your cloud data search capabilities with the new Google drive connector enabling you to search your complete Google drive history and immediately perform Post Search Actions.
• Index, search and find information in your Gmail 3 times faster with the new API-based Gmail connector.
• Patented fast-as-you-type search with built-in hit highlighting and full fidelity preview for immediate visibility into your results.
• Search across all your Outlook email, attachments, Outlook calendar, and contacts list via X1’s deep Outlook integration.
• Unified search across all your data sources to instantly search and find emails, attachments, documents, local files, and M365 data in a single search.
• Accelerate your email workflow with M365 Archived mail search capabilities – Rapidly index years’ worth of archived Outlook email in half the time.

X1 will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, April 17 introducing the game-changing, new solution capabilities now available with X1 Search version 9.

The X1 Search solution 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/products/x1-search

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Corporations, Desktop Search, Enterprise Search, ESI, Hybrid Search, Information Management, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, Records Management, SharePoint, X1 Search 9

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December 11, 2019 · 11:40 AM

CaCPA Compliance Requires Effective Investigation and eDiscovery Capabilities

By John Patzakis

The California Consumer Protection Act, (CaCPA ), which will be in full force on January 1, 2020,  promises to profoundly impact major US and global organizations, requiring the overhaul of their data audit, investigation and information governance processes. The CaCPA requires that an organization have absolute knowledge of where all personal data of California residents is stored across the enterprise, and be able to remove it when required. Many organization with a global reach will be under obligations to comply with both the GDPR and CaCPA, providing ample requirement justification to bolster their compliance efforts.

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According to data security and privacy attorney Patrick Burke, who was recently a senior New York State Financial Regular overseeing cybersecurity compliance before heading up the data privacy law practice at Phillips Nizer, CaCPA compliance effectively requires a robust digital investigation capability. Burke, speaking in a webinar earlier this month, noted that under the “CaCPA, California residents can request that all data an enterprise holds on them be identified and also be removed. Organizations will be required to establish a capability to respond to such requests. Actual demonstrated compliance will require the ability to search across all data sources in the enterprise for data, including distributed unstructured data located on desktops and file servers.” Burke further noted that organizations must be prepared to produce “electronic evidence to the California AG, which must determine whether there was a violation of CaCPA…as well as evidence of non-violation (for private rights of action) and of a ‘cure’ to the violation.”

The CaCPA contains similar provisions as the GDPR, which both specify processes and capabilities organizations must have in place to ensure the personal data of EU and California residents is secure, accessible, and can be identified upon request. These common requirements, enumerated below, can only be complied with through an effective enterprise eDiscovery search capability:

  • Data minimization: Under both the CaCPA and the GDPR, enterprises should only collect and retain as little personal data on California residents EU subjects as possible. As an example, Patrick Burke, who routinely advises his legal clients on these regulations, notes that unauthorized “data stashes” maintained by employees on their distributed unstructured data sources is a key problem, requiring companies to search all endpoints to identify information including European phone numbers, European email address domains and other personal identifiable information.
  • Enforcement of right to be forgotten: An individual’s personal data must be identified and deleted on request.
  • Effective incident response: If there is a compromise of personal data, an organization must have the ability to perform enterprise-wide data searches to determine and report on the extent of such breaches and resulting data compromise within seventy-two (72) hours under the GDPR. There are less stringent, but similar CaCPA requirements.
  • Accountability: Log and provide audit trails for all personal data identification requests and remedial actions.
  • Enterprise-wide data audit: Identify the presence of personal data in all data locations and delete unneeded copies of personal data.

Overall, a core requirement of both CaCPA and GDPR compliance is the ability to demonstrate and prove that personal data is being protected, requiring information governance capabilities that allow companies to efficiently produce the documentation and other information necessary to respond to auditors’ requests. Many consultants and other advisors are helping companies establish privacy compliance programs, and are documenting policies and procedures that are being put in place.

However, while policies, procedures and documentation are important, such compliance programs are ultimately hollow without consistent, operational execution and enforcement. CIOs and legal and compliance executives often aspire to implement information governance programs like defensible deletion and data audits to detect risks and remediate non-compliance. However, without an actual and scalable technology platform to effectuate these goals, those aspirations remain just that. For instance, recent IDG research suggests that approximately 70% of information stored by companies is “dark data” that is in the form of unstructured, distributed data that can pose significant legal and operational risks.

To achieve GDPR and CaCPA compliance, organizations must ensure that explicit policies and procedures are in place for handling personal information, and just as important, the ability to prove that those policies and procedures are being followed and operationally enforced. What has always been needed is gaining immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints and other unstructured data sources, and return results within minutes instead of days or weeks. The need for such an operational capability provided by best practices technology is further heightened by the urgency of CaCPA and GDPR compliance.

A link to the recording of the recent webinar “Effective Incident Response Under GDPR and CaCPA”, is available here.

 

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Filed under CaCPA, compliance, Data Audit, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, GDPR, Records Management, Uncategorized

June 28, 2018 · 8:15 AM

Assessing GDPR 30 Days In: A Report from the Field

Enforcement of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) began May 25, 2018, and this new development is significantly reshaping the information governance landscape for organizations worldwide that control, process or store the data of European residents. Yesterday, X1 hosted a live webinar featuring GDPR experts Jay Kramer, a partner at Lewis Brisbois in the firm’s cybersecurity and privacy group, and Marty Provin, executive vice president at Jordan Lawrence.

Kramer provided a “battlefield report” about what he is seeing from the field and hearing from his various clients, with three main observations:

  1. Many are still late to the game. Kramer noted that he has several clients contacting him well after the May 25 enforcement date to begin the process of GDPR compliance.
  1. GDPR compliance maps to best practices. Becoming GDPR ready is a good business decision because it establishes transparency, data privacy and security processes that companies should be doing anyway.
  1. Now that the law has gone into effect, organizations that have been proactive are quickly transitioning from readiness to operational compliance and enforcement. For instance, many organizations are finding themselves responding to data subject access requests.

Kramer also noted that while much focus has been on potential fines levied under GDPR, organizations need to be aware that individuals can file complaints with the supervisory authorities under article 77, or even bring their own private actions, citing article 82. These claims have already been brought in the form of class actions, and Kramer expressed concern that many more claims could be fanned by “privacy trolls” – similar in concept to “patent trolls” – or by disgruntled customers or ex-employees.

Marty Provin outlined the importance of information governance and data classification in support GDPR compliance, especially from a standpoint of the need to operationalize policies and procedures in order to identify non-compliant data throughout your organization, and properly respond to regulatory requirements and data subject access requests. Kramer seconded that point, noting that the GDPR requires that an organization have absolute knowledge of where all EU personal data is stored across the enterprise and be able to remove or minimize it when required.

This readiness is achieved through planning, data mapping, and data classification. Provin provided an informative overview of these processes, based upon his extensive experience implementing such best practices for his clients over the past 20 years. Marty observed that it is also important to have a solution like X1 Data Audit and Compliance to search and identify documents, emails and other records across your enterprise that are non-compliant with GDPR. Such a capability is essential to address both the proactive and reactive components of GDPR.

The final segment of the webinar included a live demonstration of a proactive data audit across numerous computers to find PII of EU data subjects. The second half of the demonstration illustrated an effective response to an actual data subject access request in the form of a request by an individual to have their data erased.

In addition to comprehensive search, the demo highlighted the ability of X1 to also report in a detailed fashion and then take action on identified data by migrating it or even delete in place, including within email containers.

A recording of this informative and timely webinar is available for viewing here.

 

 

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

February 28, 2018 · 8:51 AM

GDPR Provides a Private Right of Action. Here’s Why That’s Important.

As the world approaches the May 25, 2018 GDPR enforcement date, some organizations are still adapting a wait and see approach, while many others are preparing with a palpable sense of urgency. Gartner published a study reporting that over 50% of companies affected by GDPR will not meet the May deadline. And then there are some pundits who are predicting Armageddon. While the Armageddon forecasts are premature, I do not see a lot of awareness, even among some legal privacy lawyers, of the private right action afforded under the GDPR.

A very important dynamic of the GDPR is that the private citizens of the European Union will have an active role in its enforcement. Unlike many regulatory regimes, where a relatively small handful of government regulators infrequently enforce the rules, organizations that store information on EU citizens will face about 300 million regulators, which is a rough figure of the adult population in the EU. These citizens can make requests at any time to have data deleted in place through the right of erasure as well as make other requests regarding the usage of their personal data.

Even more importantly, the GDPR provides a mechanism for a private right of action under Article 82(1).  And Article 80(2) provides that “[T]he data subject shall have the right to mandate a not-for-profit body, organisation or association …. to lodge the complaint on his or her behalf.”

Regulations which provide a private right of action, including the ability to bring a class action law suit, are exponentially more impactful than the vast majority of regulations which do not.

European privacy lawyer and activist Max Schrems — fresh off his major legal victory resulting the safe harbor provisions in the data transfer arrangement between the EU and US being struck down in 2015 — is running a crowdfunding campaign to set up a not-for-profit privacy enforcement organization to take advantage of the GDPR right of private action provisions to pursue class-action style litigation. Shrems’ NGO, — called noyb; short for: ‘none of your business’ — is being made possible because GDPR allows for collective enforcement of individuals’ data rights.

Mr. Schrems told the Financial Times the organization would help consumers fight for their rights and encourage whistleblowers inside tech companies to speak out. “It makes sense to have a single EU hub to act as a coordinator to connect existing resources, ensure actions are effective and strategic, and ensure efforts and resources are not duplicated,” he said. In other public statements, Schrmes noted that his organization will enable class-action style GDPR claims in order “to enforce your rights individually. The only way to do that is to collectivise it through a rights organisation to get things done as we have in the past with consumer rights.” Schrems and his partners believe that having a single NGO at an EU level with the necessary expertise, experience and connections is far more efficient than lots of individual ones.

These developments concerning a possible torrent of private GDPR claims heighten the urgency and expected impact of the law. In terms of readiness, a mandatory aspect of GDPR compliance is the ability to demonstrate and prove that personal data is being protected, requiring information governance capabilities that allow companies to efficiently produce the documentation and other information necessary to respond to regulators and EU private citizen’s requests. As such, any GDPR compliance programs are ultimately hollow without consistent, operational execution and enforcement. To achieve GDPR compliance and also EU data shield certification, organizations must ensure that explicit policies and procedures are in place for handling personal information, and just as importantly, the ability to prove that those policies and procedures are being followed and operationally enforced. What has always been needed is gaining immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints and other unstructured data sources, and return results regarding PII leakage within minutes instead of days or weeks. The need for such an operational capability is further heighted by the urgency of GDPR compliance.

X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) represents a unique approach, by enabling enterprises to quickly and easily search across multiple distributed endpoints and data servers for PII and other data from a central location.  Legal 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 X1DD, organizations can also automatically migrate, collect, delete, or take other action on the data as a result of the search parameters.  Built on our award-winning and patented X1 Search technology, X1DD 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.

X1DD operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or even the Cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations. Beyond enterprise eDiscovery, GDPR and other information governance compliance functionality, X1DD includes the award-winning X1 Search, improving employee productivity while effectuating that all too illusive actual compliance with information governance programs, including GDPR.

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November 22, 2016 · 8:17 AM

Effective Information Governance Requires Effective Enterprise Technology

Information governance is the compilation of policies, processes, and controls enforced and executed with effective technology to manage electronically stored information throughout the enterprise. Leading IT industry research firm Gartner states that “the goal of information governance is to ensure compliance with laws and regulations, mitigate risks and protect the confidentiality of sensitive company and customer data.” A strong, proactive information governance strategy that strikes the balance between under-retention and over-retention of information can provide dramatic cost savings while significantly reducing risk.

However, while policies, procedures and documentation are important, information governance programs are ultimately hollow without consistent, operational execution and enforcement. CIOs and legal and compliance executives often aspire to implement information governance programs like defensible deletion, data migration, and data audits to detect risks and remediate non-compliance. However, without an actual and scalable technology platform to effectuate these goals, those aspirations remain just that. For instance, recent IDG research suggests that approximately 70% of information stored by companies is “dark data” that is in the form of unstructured, distributed data that can pose significant legal and operational risk and cost.

To date, organizations have employed limited technical approaches to try and execute on their information governance initiatives, enduring many struggles. For instance, software agent-based crawling methods are commonly attempted and can cause repeated high user computer resources utilization for each search initiated and network bandwidth limitations being pushed to the limits rendering the approach ineffective. So being able to search and audit across at least several hundred distributed end points in a repeatable and quick fashion is effectively impossible under this approach.

Another 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. The execution of this strategy will still leave the end user’s computer needing to be scanned as there is never a moment when all users in the enterprise have just finished this process with no new data created. That means now that both the central repository and the end-points will need to be searched and increasing the complexity and management of the job. Boiling the ocean through data migration and centralization is extremely expensive, highly disruptive, and frankly unworkable as it never removes the need to conduct constant local computer searching, again through problematic crawling methods.

What has always been needed is gaining immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints 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 governance failures.

X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) represents a unique approach, by enabling enterprises to quickly and easily search across multiple distributed endpoints and data servers from a central location.  Legal 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 X1DD, 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, X1DD 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.

X1DD operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or even the Cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations. Beyond enterprise eDiscovery and information governance functionality, organizations offer employees at the same time, the award-winning X1 Search, improving productivity while effectuating that all too illusive actual compliance with information governance programs.

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery & Compliance, Information Governance, Information Management, Records Management, SharePoint, X1 Search 8