Tag Archives: information

May 1, 2018 · 8:42 AM

Data Discovery “Is the Foundation of GDPR Compliance”

Recently, I attended a very informative Microsoft GDPR Summit in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft invited their key compliance partners to brief them on Microsoft’s strong support for GDPR compliance within their Office 365 ecosystem, and to engage them in their strategy. The summit featured a slate of legal, compliance and technology experts who provided compelling insight into the GDPR, including challenges and opportunities for organizations as the May 25 enforcement date approaches.

Enza Iannopollo, a featured keynote speaker from Forrester, is an industry analyst with a deep focus on information security, data privacy and GDPR compliance. She noted that per a recent Forrester security survey, only about 30 percent of organizations report GDPR readiness. In her talks with major organizations, Iannopollo sees a strong if not belated commitment as they scramble to achieve readiness ahead of May 18. In terms of what it takes to effectuate GDPR compliance, Iannopollo presented a slide which simply stated the following: “Data Discovery and classification are the foundation of GDPR compliance.” Iannopollo said this is because the GDPR effectively requires that an organization be able to identify and actually locate, with precision, personal data of EU data subjects across the organization.

The speakers identified both a proactive and reactive requirement of data discovery under the GDPR. Iannopollo commented that a robust data discovery capability is needed to produce an intelligent data map, to classify and actually remediate non-compliant data. This data audit process should done at the outset, and also routinely executed on a recurring basis.

For reactive capabilities, Microsoft deputy general counsel John Payseno noted in a separate session that once GDPR enforcement comes online on May 25, 2018, organizations will be required to respond to data subject requests (DSRs) from individual, or groups of, EU data subjects. The DSRs under the GDPR consist of requests for data erasure, data transfer, or a confirmation that data permissively kept is done so in a minimal fashion without excessive duplication or re-purposing outside of the granted consent. Payseno said that companies must be able to document and demonstrate compliance with these DSRs, in a manner generally akin to responding to a subpoena or other legal requirement.

So a clear takeaway from the Microsoft summit is that GDPR compliance requires the ability to demonstrate and prove that personal data is being protected, requiring data audit and discovery 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.

While Microsoft demonstrated their capabilities to conduct effective data discovery in their O365 cloud environment, they openly acknowledge a significant gap for addressing on-premise unstructured data. Effective GDPR compliance requires the ability to gain 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 weeks or months as is the case with traditional crawling tools.

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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Filed under Best Practices, compliance, Corporations, Data Audit, GDPR, Hybrid Search, Information Governance, Uncategorized

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January 26, 2015 · 1:06 PM

Social Media More Relevant than Ever — Hundreds of Thousands of Legal Cases Estimated to Address Social Media in 2014

by John Patzakis

Law Journal for webAs part of our ongoing effort to monitor legal developments concerning social media evidence, we again searched online legal databases of state and federal court decisions across the United States — this time to identify the number of cases in 2014 where evidence from social networking sites played a significant role. The initial search returned over 10,000 results. That is far too many to review manually, but through random sampling to eliminate duplicates and de minimis entries — defined as cases with merely cursory or passing mentions of social media sites — we counted over 5,500 cases accessible through Westlaw. This represents a 3x increase over 2013.

And as only a very small number of cases — approximately one percent of all filed cases — involve a published decision or brief that we can access online, it is safe to assume that hundreds of thousands more cases involved social media evidence during this time period. Additionally, many of these published decisions involve fact patterns from as far back as 2009 (that I saw), as they are now just working their way through the discovery motion/appeals process. Finally, these cases do not reflect the presumably many hundreds of thousands of more instances where social media evidence was relevant to a corporate or law enforcement investigation yet did not evolve into actual litigation. Even so, this limited survey is an important data point establishing the ubiquitous nature of social media evidence, its unequivocal and compelling importance, and the necessity of best practices technology to search and collect this data for litigation and compliance requirements.

As succinctly noted by The Florida Bar Association in its publication, Florida Law Journal, “SOCIAL MEDIA EVIDENCE: WHAT YOU CAN’T USE WON’T HELP YOU” (2014) Volume 88, No. 1:

“Social media is everywhere. Nearly everyone uses it. Litigants who understand social media–and its benefits and limitations– can immeasurably help their clients resolve disputes. If not properly researched, preserved, and authenticated, the best social media evidence is worthless.”

And:

“Social networking sites have grown from a few thousand users to more than a billion. These sites have become a preferred form of electronic communication, surpassing email in 2009. As of March 31, 2011, 9,370,620 Floridians had registered for a Facebook account, which is approximately half of the state’s population. Based on these statistics, it is inevitable that the social media accounts of at least one person involved in a dispute will have potentially relevant and discoverable information.”

This is why several other Bar Associations have now weighed in to assert that a lawyer’s duty of competence requires addressing social media evidence. New Hampshire Bar Association published Opinion 2012-13/05 providing that lawyers “have a general duty to be aware of social media as a source of potentially useful information in litigation, to be competent to obtain that information directly or through an agent, and to know how to make effective use of that information in litigation.” The Pennsylvania Bar weighed in with a similar opinion, and the ABA recently published Comment [8] to Model Rule 1.1, which provides that a lawyer “should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.”

And we are of course seeing this explosive trend in the adaptation of X1 Social Discovery. Over 250 eDiscovery and computer forensics services firms have at least one paid copy of X1 Social Discovery. I can think of no greater validation of a software or process than this mass and widespread adaption by these early adopters, who are of course the experts on best practices and litigation technology trends.

After the adoption by eDiscovery consultants comes law firms, and we count over 100 as paid customers, ranging from several dozen AMLaw 100 firms to small five attorney operations. And the strong adoption of law enforcement and government regulatory agencies is also a compelling indicator, where we count over 120 such agencies worldwide as customers.

But clearly the results from our Westlaw survey and the opinions of the Florida, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and American Bar Associations speak for themselves. And, if that is not enough, you can see from an earlier blog post just how costly it can be to manually collect, preserve, and review social media evidence.  So, if you are one of the soon to become minority of digital investigative or eDiscovery professionals who have not adopted X1 Social Discovery, please contact us for a demo today.

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October 27, 2014 · 11:10 AM

The Time Has Come to Approach Search Differently

Anyone in the search / eDiscovery business lives and breathes search – we think about all day, every day because it is our livelihood.  At X1, we have many customers making real progress with enterprise search, so there can be the perception that organizations have learned to address the very real challenge of helping employees find information.  Thus, it can be surprising to run into research that shows just how bad the traditional approach to enterprise search is.

I came across the “Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2014” on the Findwise website.  It is very interesting reading and really confirms that a new approach to enterprise search is needed.  Some of the key points, from my perspective, are;

  • Almost half of the survey respondents in large organizations (1,000 employees or more) find it difficult or very difficult to find information.
  • Almost two-thirds of respondents are either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their existing search applications.
  • Almost two-thirds of respondents believe it is very important to improve the ability to find the right information.

Simply put, traditional enterprise search did not work.  Too many employees complain about not being able to find what they are looking for.  The search solutions deployed over the last 15 years focused on IT requirements rather than end-user requirements.  These tools required end-users to tag and rate their search results, something end-users have neither the time nor the emotional investment to do.  This very point is something that Marcus Stimler, CTO of Capgemini UI, points out on the webinar we did earlier this month – the reliance of traditional search tools on end-users to tag information leads to a lack of findability.  This survey just confirms that fact.

It is not all doom and gloom, however, as many X1 customers know.  There is a better way to approach enterprise search and it begins with the end-user.  In today’s business world, end-users know what they want.  They demand good experiences with technology.   A web page with links to search results will not cut it in the enterprise.  Users need a single-pane-of-glass view to all of their information – email, files, SharePoint, archives like Symantec Enterprise Vault, and other enterprise repositories that users might access.   X1 Search 8 provides just that – a user-friendly interface to all information that lets workers use their brains to find what they are looking for.

Beyond the desktop, X1 Rapid Discovery indexes other sources of content – either on-premise or in the Cloud – and makes the information available alongside a user’s local content.  Perhaps the beauty of this approach lies mostly with its simplicity.  Workers are happy because they can find information.  IT is surprisingly happy because they have a search tool that is easily deployable, as opposed to the traditional complex science project.  This overall happiness is a result of a new approach to enterprise search starting with end-user requirements and extending outward.  It is a subtle difference, but a meaningful one that will drive the results of future findability surveys to a new level.

For more on our perspectives on why enterprise search initiatives often fail, while X1 is invariably successful, please download this short treatise. This was inspired by direct feedback from many successful X1 install sites.  In a nutshell, X1 addresses users’ personalized requirements for business productivity search.

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Click image to enlarge

A key mistake is to take big data or web search solutions and apply them to the very different use case of business productivity search. The matrix displayed here illustrates the key differences between these use cases.

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September 10, 2014 · 8:33 AM

End-User Computing & Search Go Hand-In-Hand

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by Barry Murphy

Last week, John Patzakis here at X1 blogged about the VMworld 2014 event and how it has become the Comdex for enterprise IT.  I was at the show and it was very clear that end-users are the future of IT.  The trend has been talked about for quite some time and is commonly called the consumerization of IT.  The heat around that topic has tended to focus on devices and not as much on what is behind information access on those devices.  But, as BYOD takes off and mobility becomes increasingly important, enterprises care more and more about the flow and availability of information.  Why?  Because easy access to information is critical to the end-user acceptance of enterprise IT offerings; when users cannot quickly find what they are looking for, they reject what IT rolls out to them.  Without that end-user acceptance, there is no chance for a positive ROI on any IT project.

End-user experience is so key that VMware has named a division of its company “End User Computing.”  That EUC unit made several major acquisitions in the last year, including Airwatch and Desktone.  This is because technology providers need to win the battle with end-users.  For an example of a company that built its business on the backs of end-users and leveraged those relationships to bully its way into enterprise IT, look no further than Apple.  As VDI users have learned, it is critical to bake search requirements into virtual desktop deployments from the get-go in order to ensure an optimal user experience.  And, as Brian Katz points out in his blog, the same thing will hold true with mobile – usability will be key.  That is why we at X1 are so excited about the future.  X1’s user interface for search is second to none.  And, users actually rave about it.

In my days as an industry analyst, I rarely had technology users raving about the tools they were using.  And, I never ever had an enterprise search user tell me that their solution solved the challenge of finding information quickly.  The rabid users of X1 have been an eye opener for me.  In fact, an X1 customer recently polled its users and virtually every user said that X1 is easy to learn and use (no easy feat for a piece of enterprise software) and over 70% of users described their experience with X1 as very positive or positive.  Those numbers are unheard of in terms of technology satisfaction.

With what I’ve learned from my days as an analyst and in my time here at X1, I’ve come up with some ways to approach enterprise search in a way that is both IT and user-friendly.  We will share the knowledge in a webinar on October 9 at 1pm ET / 10am PT.  We’ve titled it, “Making Enterprise Search Actually Work by Putting User Experience First.”

In this “no-death-by-PowerPoint” webinar, attendees will not only learn, but actually see how to deploy enterprise search solutions in ways that make both end-users and IT departments happy.  This webinar will demonstrate both why and how to put end-user experience first.   Specifically, attendees will learn:

  • Why the human brain is the best analytical engine for business productivity search
  • How federation can save IT time, money, and headaches
  • How to best deploy search solutions in all IT infrastructures
  • How to achieve ROI on enterprise search in ways never seen in the past
  • That search can be like BASF – it can make many other technology deployments better, including VDI, SharePoint, and Enterprise Vault

I will be presenting on this webinar and will be joined by some special guests to be named later.  Come learn why search and end-user computing go hand-in-hand.

Register for the webinar here >

 

 

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July 15, 2014 · 8:28 AM

The “Desktop” Of The Future

In talking with a business acquaintance recently, a question came up about the future of desktop search:  what happens when the desktop is no longer the interface of choice for business professionals?  It’s a great question, and one I clearly have a vested interest in given X1’s status as the leading desktop search engine.  The reality is that today’s workers access their information from a variety of interfaces across many devices.  What we need to do is think of the desktop less in a literal sense and more in terms of being a user interface for information.

Since the dawn of the PC, the desktop has been the user interface for most business professionals to access information and do their jobs.  The future of that desktop no longer lies in accessing it on a PC, or even a laptop or mobile device.  Given the speed of innovation, it is useless to try and forecast what the “desktop” will look like beyond a five-year timeframe.  Already, there are stories emerging about the desktop being built into things like tabletop coffee tables.  It is absolutely fun and inspiring to see developments like this and to know we are making forward progress in the tech world.  At the same time, we need to make sure that information – which will be stored in a variety of locations, too – is accessible to the business professional no matter what the desktop looks like in the future.

That is why X1’s Search 8 Virtual Edition is so exciting.  The flagship product, Search 8, represents years of experience providing a beloved user interface to a business profession’s most critical information – email, files, SharePoint, etc.  When the product first came out nearly a decade ago, most of that information was stored locally.  Thus, a local index could live on the desktop and X1 could provide fast-as-you-type search results and filtering on that local index.  Given the evolution of the desktop and the variety of devices accessing that desktop, a local index is not always a possibility.  That’s where Search 8 Virtual Edition comes in.  The client interface is decoupled from the index, which can live anywhere (typically off on a server farm).

VDI image

This allows IT teams that have invested in desktop virtualization (VDI) to turn off Windows indexing (necessary to save virtual resources) and still provide business professionals the ability to find their information.  Desktop virtualization enables many of the things that businesses value highly – especially security and mobility – and comes in its own variety of flavors.  VDI can be either on-premise and through the Cloud, as Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS).  Increasingly, DaaS offerings such as Amazon Workspaces are becoming more enterprise ready and promise to deliver desktops in a “whenever, wherever” fashion (and, as I’ve posted about before, a good search experience will be crucial to getting the most out of DaaS).

That Search 8 Virtual Edition helps enable an optimal experience with desktop virtualization and DaaS is a great thing, but the value does not stop there.  The same concept – allowing the index to be decoupled from the client interface – will enable great search experiences for mobile, which is the next big stomping ground for enterprise IT.  And, X1 is the only search vendor providing this capability.  We know that the concept of the desktop could live anywhere.  And, our customers want to be able to use X1 Search 8 even if they are unable to have a local index on their machine or device.

The term “desktop search” is already out there and meaningful to many people, so it’s not about changing what we call this market.  Rather, it’s about changing the mindset – realizing that the desktop is not just the screen on your PC, but rather the gateway to all of your important information needed to do your job.

 

 

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