Category Archives: SharePoint

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.