Tag Archives: Amazon

October 13, 2015 · 8:57 AM

A Series of Firsts: How X1 Sets the Standard for the New Enterprise Search Market

by Barry Murphy

The new world of IT demands that enterprise software support varying infrastructures – traditional managed data centers, the cloud, hybrid and virtual environments.  As a result, old-school approaches that once seemed logical no longer work in today’s reality.  For example, tightly-coupled search appliances that marry hardware and software together no longer meet the requirements of enterprises that need to make distributed workers more productive no matter what kind of device they are on.  It’s a new world for enterprise search and traditional solutions will have a very hard time adapting and scaling.

X1 is ready for the IT reality of always-on, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments and business mobility.  This is evidenced by two “firsts” that X1 is proud to announce.  First, X1 is the first search application with an app publicly available in an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) app store.  X1 Search Mobile is available in the AirWatch marketplace.  Given the rapid move to mobile devices for work, this is no small news.  Google just announced on Friday that searching the web is now predominantly done from mobile phones.

Click to enlarge image

Click to enlarge image

It’s clear, then, that enterprise search from the mobile device is now an essential requirement for business professionals.  The mobile search app is important, but what X1 is building out is much more than that.  In order to effectively deliver enterprise search from the mobile device requires having the back-end infrastructure to support full enterprise search in virtual environments.  It also requires supporting the next-generation desktop (VDI or DaaS) where the users live. X1 has uniquely mastered such back-end infrastructure with the only desktop search (VDI or otherwise) and enterprise search solution that are VMware Ready certified.

The second “first” that X1 is proud of is the listing of X1 Rapid Discovery in the Amazon AWS Marketplace.  Again, this is no small feat – this is the first enterprise-grade search and eDiscovery application to be available in the AWS Marketplace.

AWS marketplace

Click to enlarge image

Organizations storing content in AWS can now get full-featured enterprise search and eDiscovery deployed right next to their content.  And, if these organizations store other content locally, they can deploy Rapid Discovery in their own data center as well and have a single-pane-of-glass across all information no matter where it lives.

X1 will continue to provide solutions that work in the infrastructures that organizations utilize today.  The traditional approach to search will not work, but with X1, companies will have the flexibility to deploy into any environment and give users a powerful search experience on any device.  That is a powerful productivity tool – and businesses require worker productivity the same way humans require oxygen.  It is a new enterprise search market out there and X1 is uniquely positioned to lead the charge.

1 Comment

Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, Hybrid Search, Information Management

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 17, 2014 · 12:01 PM

Amazon Re:Invent – With the Cloud, Avoid Mistakes of the Past

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Amazon Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Over 13,000 people took over the Palazzo for deep dive technical sessions to learn how to harness the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS). reinventThis show had a much different energy than other enterprise software conferences, such as VMworld.  Whereas most conferences feature a great deal of selling and marketing by the host, Amazon Re:Invent was truly more of a training show. Cloud architects spent a lot of time in technical bootcamps learning how AWS works and getting certified as administrators.

That is not to say that there was no selling or marketing going on; the exhibition hall featured myriad vendors that augment or assist with AWS deployments and solutions. The focus on the deep technical details, though, does point out the fact that we are still in the very early days of the cloud. Most of the focus of the keynotes was about getting compute workloads to the cloud – there was not a lot of mention of moving actual data to the cloud, even though that is certainly beginning to happen.  But, that is how the evolution goes. IT departments need to be comfortable moving workloads to the cloud as they begin to leverage the cloud. Building this foundation is also important to Amazon – the goal would be for many companies to completely outsource the IT data center.

It is important, however, to proactive plan for information management as more workloads and, importantly, data move to the cloud.  As the internet first emerged, companies dove into new technologies like email and network file shares only to create eDiscovery nightmares and make it virtually impossible to find information within digital landfills. It is key to learn from those mistakes rather than to repeat them when leveraging cloud-based technologies. In order to ensure both that end-users are happy with search experiences on data in the cloud and that Legal can do what they need to do from an eDiscovery standpoint. This means providing business workers with unified access to email, files, and SharePoint information regardless of where the data lives. It also means giving Legal teams fast search queries and collections. But, Cloud search is slow, as indexes live far from the information. This results in frustrated workers and Legal teams afraid that eDiscovery cannot be completed in time.

If a customer wanted to speed up search, it would have to essentially attach an appliance to a hot-air balloon and send it up to the Cloud provider so that the customer’s index could live on that appliance (or farm of appliances) in the Cloud providers data center, physically near the data. There are many reasons, however, that a Cloud provider would not allow a customer to do that:

  • Long install process
  • Challenging Pre-requisites
  • 3rd party installation concerns
  • Physical access
  • Specific hardware requirements
  • They only scale vertically

The solution to a faster search is a cloud-deployable search application, such as X1 Rapid Discovery. This creates a win-win for Cloud providers and customers alike. As enterprises move more and more information to the Cloud, it will be important to think about workers’ experiences with Cloud systems – and search is one of those user experiences that, if it is a bad one, can really negatively affect a project and cause user revolt. eDiscovery is also a major concern – I’ve worked with organizations that moved data to the cloud before planning how they would handle eDiscovery. That left Legal teams to clean up messes, or more realistically, just deal with the messes. By thinking about these issues before moving data to the cloud, it is possible to avoid these painful occurrences and leverage the cloud without headaches. At X1, we look forward to working closely with Amazon to help customers have the search and eDiscovery solutions they need as more and more data goes to AWS.

Leave a comment

Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, Hybrid Search, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

June 4, 2012 · 5:31 PM

Judge Peck: Cloud For Enterprises Not Cost-Effective Without Efficient eDiscovery Process

Hon. Andrew J. Peck
United States Magistrate Judge

Federal Court Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck of the New York Southern District is known for several important decisions affecting the eDiscovery field including the ongoing  Monique da Silva Moore v. Publicis Group SA, et al, case where he issued a landmark order authorizing the use of predictive coding, otherwise known as technology assisted review. His Da Silva Moore ruling is clearly an important development, but also very noteworthy are Judge Peck’s recent public comments on eDiscovery in the cloud.

eDiscovery attorney Patrick Burke, a friend and former colleague at Guidance Software, reports on his blog some interesting comments asserted on the May 22 Judges panel session at the 2012 CEIC conference. UK eDiscovery expert Chris Dale also blogged about the session, where Judge Peck noted that data stored in the cloud is considered accessible data under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (see, FRCP Rule 26(b)(2)(B)) and thus treated no differently by the courts in terms of eDiscovery preservation and production requirements as data stored within a traditional network. This brought the following cautionary tale about the costs associated with not having a systematic process for eDiscovery:

Judge Peck told the story of a Chief Information Security Officer who had authority over e-discovery within his multi-billion dollar company who, when told that the company could enjoy significant savings by moving to “the cloud”, questioned whether the cloud provider could accommodate their needs to adapt cloud storage with the organization’s e-discovery preservation requirements. The cloud provider said it could but at such an increased cost that the company would enjoy no savings at all if it migrated to the cloud.

In previous posts on this blog, we outlined how significant cost-benefits associated with cloud migration can be negated when eDiscovery search and retrieval of that data is required.  If an organization maintains two terabytes of documents in the Amazon or other IaaS cloud deployments, how do they quickly access, search, triage and collect that data in its existing cloud environment if a critical eDiscovery or compliance search requirement suddenly arises?  This is precisely the reason why we developed X1 Rapid Discovery, version 4. X1RD is a proven and now truly cloud-deployable eDiscovery and enterprise search solution enabling our customers to quickly identify, search, and collect distributed data wherever it resides in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud or within the enterprise. While it is now trendy for eDiscovery software providers to re-brand their software as cloud solutions, X1RD is now uniquely deployable anywhere, anytime in the IaaS cloud within minutes. X1RD also features the ability to leverage the parallel processing power of the cloud to scale up and scale down as needed. In fact, X1RD is the first pure eDiscovery solution (not including a hosted email archive tool) to meet the technical requirements and be accepted into the Amazon AWS ISV program.

As far as the major cloud providers, the ones who choose to solve this eDiscovery challenge (along with effective enterprise search) with best practices technology will not only drive significant managed services revenue but will enjoy a substantial competitive advantage over other cloud services providers.

1 Comment

Filed under Best Practices, Case Law, Cloud Data, Enterprise eDiscovery, IaaS, Preservation & Collection

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 4, 2012 · 2:30 PM

Defining Truly Cloud-Capable eDiscovery Software

Last week we discussed the challenges of searching and collecting data in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud deployments (such as the Amazon cloud or Rackspace) for eDiscovery purposes.  Today we discuss what is needed for eDiscovery and enterprise search vendors to provide a truly cloud-capable solution and provide a decoder ring of sorts to cut through the hype.  For there is a lot of hype with the cloud becoming the latest eDiscovery hot button, with vendor marketing claims far surpassing actual capabilities.

In fact, many eDiscovery and enterprise software vendors claim to support the cloud, but are simply re-branding their long-existing SaaS offerings, which really has nothing to do with supporting IaaS. Barry Murphy of the eDiscovery Journal aptly identified this marketing practice as “cloud washing.” Data hosting, especially where the vendor’s manual labor is routinely required to upload and process data, does not meet defined cloud standards. Neither does a process that primarily exports data through APIs or other means out of its resident cloud environment to slowly migrate the cloud data to the vendor tools, instead of deploying the tools (and their processing power) to the data where it resides in the cloud. In order to truly support IaaS cloud deployments, eDiscovery and enterprise search software must meet the following three core requirements:

1.         Automated installation and virtualization:  The eDiscovery and search solution must immediately and rapidly install, execute and efficiently operate in a virtualized environment without rigid hardware requirements or on-site physical access. This is impossible if the solution is fused to hardware appliances or otherwise requires a complex on-site installation process. As hardware appliance solutions by definition are not cloud deployable and with enterprise search installations often requiring many months of man hours to install and configure, whether many of these vendors will be able to support robust IaaS cloud deployments in the reasonably foreseeable future is a significant question.

2.         On-demand self-service: In its definition of cloud computing, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identifies on- demand self-service as an essential characteristic of the cloud where a “consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.”

Many hosted eDiscovery services require shipping of data to the provider or extensive behind the scenes manual labor to load and configure the systems for data ingestion. Conversely, solutions that truly support cloud IaaS will spin up, ingest data and fully operate in an automated fashion without the need for manual on-premise labor for configuration or data import.

3.         Rapid elasticity: NIST describes this characteristic as capabilities that “scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.” This important benefit of cloud computing is accomplished by a parallelized software architecture designed to dynamically scale out over potentially several dozen virtualized servers to enable rapid ingestion, processing and analysis of data sets in that cloud environment. This capability would allow several terabytes of data to be indexed and processed within 2 to 4 hours on a highly automated basis at far less cost than non-cloud eDiscovery efforts.

However, many characteristics of leading eDiscovery solutions fundamentality prevent their ability to support this core cloud requirement. Most eDiscovery early case assessment solutions are developed and configured toward a monolithic processing schema designed to operate on a single expensive hardware apparatus. While recently spawning some bold marketing claims of high speeds and feeds, such architecture is very ill-suited to the cloud, which is powered by highly distributed processing across multitudes of servers. Additionally, many of the leading eDiscovery and enterprise search solutions are tightly integrated with third party databases and other OEM technology that cannot be easily decoupled (and also present possible licensing constraints) making such elasticity physically and even legally impossible.

So is there eDiscovery software that will truly support the IaaS cloud based upon these requirements, and address up to terabytes of data?  Stay tuned….

Leave a comment

Filed under Cloud Data, Enterprise eDiscovery, IaaS

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,