Tag Archives: legal

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.

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

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April 8, 2014 · 8:50 AM

Cloud Search: Not As Simple As You Think

By Barry Murphy

Corporations and Government agencies are moving data to the Cloud in droves.  No matter which analyst firm you look to on Cloud storage adoption, you will find consistent results:

  • Forrester Research reports that 40% of enterprises surveyed indicated they have already rolled out workloads on public clouds or have near-term plans to do so and that the number will increase to 50% this year.
  • IDC predicts that from 2013–2017 public IT cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5%, five times that of the IT industry as a whole.
  • Gartner says Cloud Computing Will Become the Bulk of New IT Spend by 2016 and that spending on public Cloud services will have a CAGR of 17.7% from 2011 – 2016, with spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) itself will have a CAGR of 41.3% in that time period.
  • In eDJ Group’s recent Cloud services adoption fast poll, Greg Buckles found that less than 5% of respondents reported that all information is kept on-premise on company infrastructure and cloud services are not being actively considered.

Cloud-icon_magnifying-glassNo matter where data is being stored, though, the fact remains that the ability to search that data will be critically important.  Workers still demand unified access to email, files, and SharePoint information, and they want fast-as-you-type search results regardless of where the data lives.  In addition, Legal teams require that search queries and collections execute within specific time-frames.  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.

Lest you think this is not a big deal, consider the following story.  When I was at eDJ, we worked with a very large enterprise client that wanted to move its collaboration system to the Cloud.  The problem was that the Cloud system the client was contracting with could not meet the Legal Department’s requirements for speed of query results and collection.  This significantly slowed down the movement to the Cloud until the client had worked with the Cloud vendor to ensure that search and collection could execute at the necessary speeds.  The delay frustrated an IT team anxious to reap the promised benefits of the Cloud and cost the project team significant man-hours.

This story highlights the need to granularly define search and eDiscovery requirements before moving data to the Cloud.  Most “cloud search” solutions pass queries through connectors, and then the Cloud vendor needs to figure out where in its vast data center the index lives, find the content, return the query result, and then the customer will need to download all the content.  The result is a slow search and another copy of the data downloaded on premise, which basically defeats the purpose of moving to the Cloud in the first place.

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.

 

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Filed under Cloud Data, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, Information Access, Virtualized Environment

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September 25, 2012 · 8:19 PM

National White Collar Crime Center Launches Certified Training for X1 Social Discovery

This past month, the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), an internationally recognized leader in education and support in the prevention and prosecution of high-tech crime, announced a strategic partnership with X1 Discovery to provide training and support to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies worldwide, as well as to legal, corporate discovery and risk professionals. The partnership will focus on promoting best practices and advanced techniques for website and social media evidence collection and analysis, based upon the X1 Social Discovery software.

Training and certification on a computer investigation process is very important to help bolster the qualifications of a testifying witness. A great example of this is the “on point” case of State v. Rossi, where an Ohio appellate addressed the issue of authentication of social media evidence and involved the expert testimony of a police detective, where the defense unsuccessfully challenged his qualifications as a computer forensics expert. Here is the key quote from the court:

“Det. Roderick testified that he received forensic computer training from the FBI and National White Collar Crime Center. Accordingly, the trial court did not err by
allowing Det. Roderick to testify as an expert in forensic computer investigations.” (Emphasis added)

As State v. Rossi tackles social media evidence, best practices for its collection (which were not followed by the defense), the issues of training, expert testimony, and the credibility of NW3C, the case serves as “Exhibit A” for the importance of the NW3C and X1 Discovery relationship.

NW3C has now posted their first schedule of classes online, available here. The classes are open to both law enforcement and private sector professionals. The training curriculum will provide best practices and new methods to collect, search, preserve and manage social media evidence from social media networking sites and other websites in a scalable, instantaneous and forensically sound manner. Participants will learn about specific cases involving critical social media data; find out how to collect and index thousands of social media items in minutes; understand and identify key metadata unique to social media; learn how to better authenticate social media evidence in a safe and defensible manner; and more. Attendees who complete the course will received a certificate of authorized training on the X1 Social Discovery software, which is designed to effectively address social media content from the leading social media networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition, it can crawl, capture and instantly search content from any website.

The cost of the 1-day training is $595, which is a great investment in your credentials and career as an expert witness and computer investigation professional.


 > Learn more about this “hands-on” training in our live webinar

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October 17, 2011 · 7:14 PM

Social Media: Highly Relevant, Clearly Discoverable but No Workable eDiscovery Workflow – Until Now

As reflected by extensive recent discussion in the legal and eDiscovery community in recent months (see links to examples here, here, here, and here) it is clear we all understand social media evidence is relevant to just about any type of civil and criminal case and thus must be routinely addressed in discovery. However, despite the obvious necessity for social media eDiscovery, legal and investigative professionals have lacked an effective means to effectively address social media evidence in their workflow in the same manner as email and files.

The situation reminds me of when I first entered the eDiscovery field as a co-founder of Guidance Software back in 1999. Everyone knew circa 1998 the importance of all the evidence residing on computers with those Windows 95 operating systems to their criminal cases and for civil discovery. But collecting and analyzing that evidence at that time meant that you either tortured yourself with DOS tools to image, restore and somehow search those hard drives or simply booted up live evidence and rummaged through Windows Explorer. Once Windows-based computer forensics tools like EnCase and later FTK became the new paradigm, the computer forensics field, and soon thereafter eDiscovery, took off and became a standard practice.

Today, instead of DOS tools, investigators, eDiscovery consultants and paralegals at major law firms tell us they are mostly scouring Facebook.com and Twitter.com and creating page-by-page screen captures. This agonizing exercise can take hours to capture each available screen for a single Facebook account. And as addressed by recent court decisions, screen captures are not best practices when establishing a proper chain of custody and seeking to authenticate the evidence at trial.

So this week, we are launching X1 Social Discovery to enable a far more efficient, cost-effective and defensible process to address social media evidence. In a nutshell, X1 Social Discovery provides two core benefits. First, it is very fast, comprehensive and intuitive, collecting and indexing tens of thousands of potentially relevant social media items per hour and searching them with the instantaneous and patented X1 Search technology all in a very simple user interface. Secondly, it provides best practices for the preservation and authentication of social media, generating hash values for all collected items, collecting and preserving dozens of unique social media metadata fields and documenting a clear and concise chain of custody from collection through export to load file or native format.

X1 Social Discovery has been several years in the making. The foundation is the award-winning X1 Search platform recently recognized by Network World as the best productivity search platform in the industry, beating out Google Desktop and Windows 7. X1 Social Discovery’s features and intelligence is borne through a perfect combination of years of research and development in the technical collection and search of social media by Idealab technologists and an experienced eDiscovery product development team.

In sum, we believe X1 Social Discovery represents enabling technology that addresses a critical need with an order of magnitude solution — One that allows for eDiscovery and legal professionals to not only reactively but proactively harvest the vast ocean of social media evidence in a rapid, defensible and cost-effective manner. We hope you agree and look forward to your comments, suggestions and continued support.

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