Tag Archives: Microsoft

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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May 25, 2017 · 7:41 AM

Microsoft Office 365 is Disrupting the eDiscovery Industry in a Major and Permanent Fashion

The adoption of cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 (“O365”) within enterprises is growing exponentially. According to a 2016 Gartner survey, 78 percent of enterprises use or plan to use Office 365, up from 64 percent in mid-2014. O365 includes built-in eDiscovery tools in the Security and Compliance Center at an additional cost. Many, but not all, O365 customers are utilizing the internal eDiscovery module, to which Microsoft is dedicating a lot of effort and resources in order to provide a go-to solution for the eDiscovery of all information located within O365. o365-logoBased upon my assessment through product demos and discussions with industry colleagues, I believe Microsoft will achieve this goal relatively soon for data housed within its O365 platform. The Equivio eDiscovery team that transitioned over to Microsoft in a 2015 acquisition is very dedicated to this effort and they know what they are doing.

But as I see it, the O365 revolution presents two major takeaways for the rest of the eDiscovery software and services industry. The first major point comes down to simple architecture. Most eDiscovery tools operate by making bulk copies of data associated with individual custodians, and then permanently migrate that data to their processing and/or review platform. This workflow applies to all non-Microsoft email archiving platforms, appliance-based processing platforms, and hosted review platforms. As far as email archiving, a third-party email archive solution requires the complete and redundant duplication, migration and storage of copies of all emails already located in O365. This is counter-productive to the very purpose of a cloud-based O365 investment. We have already seen non-Microsoft email archiving solutions on the decline in terms of market share, and with MS Exchange archiving becoming much more robust, we will only see that trend accelerate.

eDiscovery processing tools and review platforms are also fighting directly against the O365 tide.  This is especially true for processing appliances (whether physical or virtual), which address O365 collections through bulk copy and export of all of the target custodians’ data from O365 and into their appliance, where the data is then re-indexed. Such an effort is costly, time consuming, and inefficient. But the main problem is that clients who are investing in O365 do not want to see all their data routinely exported out of its native environment every time there is an eDiscovery or compliance investigation. Organizations are fine with a very narrow data set of relevant ESI leaving O365 after it has been reviewed and is ready to be produced in a litigation or regulatory matter. What they do not want is a mass export of terabytes of data because eDiscovery and processing tools need to broadly ingest that data in their platform in order to begin the indexing, culling and searching process. For these reasons, most eDiscovery software and compliance archiving tools do not play well with O365, and that will prove to be a significant problem for those developers and the service providers who utilize those tools for their processes.

The second major O365 consideration is that organizations, especially larger enterprises, rarely house all or even most of their data within O365, with hybrid cloud and on-premise environments being the norm. The O365 eDiscovery tools can only address what is contained within O365. Any on-premise data, including on-premise Microsoft sources (SharePoint, Exchange and Office docs on File Shares) cannot be readily consolidated by O365, and neither can data from other cloud sources such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox and AWS. And of course, desktops, whether physical or virtual, are critical to eDiscovery collections and are also not supported by the O365 eDiscovery tools, with Microsoft indicating that they do not have any plans to soon address all these non-O365 data sources in a unified fashion.

So eDiscovery software providers need to have a good process to perform unified search and collection of non-O365 sources and to consolidate those results with responsive O365 data. This process should be efficient and not simply involve mass export of data out of O365 to achieve such data consolidation.

X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) is uniquely suited to complement and support O365 with an effective and defensible process and has distinct advantages over other eDiscovery tools that solely rely on permanently migrating ESI out of O365. X1DD enables organizations to perform targeted search and collection of the ESI of up to thousands of endpoints, as well as O365 and other sources, all in a unified fashion. The search results are returned in minutes, not weeks, and thus can be highly granular and iterative, based upon multiple keywords, date ranges, file types, or other parameters. Using X1DD, O365 data sources are searched in place in a very targeted and efficient manner, and all results can be consolidated into Microsoft’s Equivio review platform or another review platform such as Relativity. This approach typically reduces the eDiscovery collection and processing costs by at least one order of magnitude (90%). For a demonstration or briefing on X1 Distributed Discovery, please contact us.

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May 19, 2015 · 8:58 AM

X1’s Microsoft Enterprise Search Strategy: Better Than Microsoft’s?

By John Patzakis

microsoftIt seems obvious to say, but Microsoft is furthering its supremacy in the enterprise. While Microsoft has always dominated with is ubiquitous OS, it is dramatically consolidating its presence in terms of data sources. Outlook is only increasing in market share with corporate Gmail largely a flop and IBM’s Lotus Notes in full retreat. SharePoint continues to spread across enterprises large and small, dominating the ECM landscape. OneDrive for business, with its tight integration with the Windows 10 OS, essentially zero cost, and built-in active directory security, looks to eventually capture the enterprise file synch and sharing space. And Office 365 combines Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive into an integrated cloud offering (but not search – more on that in a bit). Finally, Skype for Business and OneNote round out the data sources that we believe will soon constitute up to 90 percent of enterprise data relevant for business productivity. So I would argue that we are entering a new era of Microsoft dominance.

And actually, this good news for X1 users, and we believe a key reason for the resurgent high growth we are seeing here at X1. Why? Each of those mentioned Microsoft data sources are either currently supported by X1 or will be supported within 12 months’ time, and X1 provides a much better user search experience than even Microsoft does. As an example, any X1 user will tell you X1 provides a much better search of Outlook and Exchange email than Outlook itself, and the simple viewing of this SharePoint video should convince anyone that our SharePoint search experience is far superior than that of native SharePoint. The same is true of local and network documents and very soon OneDrive (September 2015), and after that Skype for Business.

But even more important than having a better search experience for individual Microsoft data sources, what X1 uniquely provides is a popular and intuitive unified interface or a “single pane of glass” from which to search all of these various data sources. To be able to search your emails, your files, your SharePoint, your OneDrive, and all the other Microsoft data sources from that single interface is extremely compelling. In fact, Microsoft itself does not really have a single pane of glass capability. You cannot effectively search your SharePoint or OneDrive from Outlook, just as you cannot search your emails, Skypes or your local documents from SharePoint.

This new era of Microsoft data source dominance presents important considerations for organizations when selecting enterprise search solutions. Many enterprise search solutions are simply not architected to effectively support this new paradigm and thus are fighting against the Microsoft current, instead of providing a unified search platform, such as X1, that augments and strengthens a company’s Microsoft strategy. To summarize, here are five key reasons X1 excels in this new Microsoft era:

  1. X1 Starts with End User’s email and files. Most enterprise search solutions address enterprise data sources on Intranets, databases, and file shares, but ignore the end users email and local documents. This is missing about 80 percent of the end user’s key business data, while focusing on the data in the margins. To be successful in this new Microsoft era, a true productivity search solution should begin with the end users’ local emails, attachments and documents and extend to SharePoint, file shares and other key enterprise sources, all in a single pane of glass.
  2. No or Minimal Data Migration. Other enterprise search tools uniformly provide web portals for employees to search for their content. This is fine for some Intranet sites and other web-based data, but is not where you want search your day-to-day emails and working documents. And when it comes to SharePoint, any suggestion that such data should be migrated out of SharePoint just so another enterprise search vendor can search it on a similar website is a non-starter. For a successful Microsoft strategy, the indexes must be on a local, physical or virtual desktop (or laptop), indexed in place, or federate to the built-in native FAST indexes. Data migration out of Microsoft data sources no longer make any sense and should be a thing of the past.
  3. X1 Supports Virtualization and Cloud. The next generation enterprise is virtual, whether cloud or on premise. With Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft data sources being able to be deployed in these and on-premise virtual environments, enterprise search, including desktop search (VDI and DaaS) platforms need to do so as well. This is a significant challenge for most enterprise search tools that are either hardware appliances or require intricate and labor intensive installation onto physical hardware.
  4. X1 provides a better search experience than Microsoft does. “Good enough” is not good enough when it comes to search. It does not make sense to invest in an enterprise search solution for business productivity search, unless there is a significant improvement in the end-users search experience for emails, files and SharePoint data. The main reason enterprise search initiatives fail is because the stakeholders do not appreciate that business productivity search is all about end-user experience. Without the end-users embracing your search platform in practice, as X1 users do, the project will fail, no matter how cool the analytics and advanced algorithms sound in theory.
  5. Unified Single Pane of Glass. Providing one single pane of glass to a business worker’s most critical information assets is key. Requiring end-users to search Outlook for email in one interface, then log into another to search SharePoint, and then another to search for document and OneDrive is a non-starter. A single interface to search for information, no matter where it lives fits the workflow that business workers require.

These are all very important factors for buyers of enterprise search solutions to consider in the new Microsoft era, and we of course believe X1 is uniquely up to the task.

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February 26, 2014 · 1:13 PM

Avoid SharePoint eDiscovery Headaches Before They Begin

by Barry Murphy

Sharepoint no colorLast week, this blog featured highlights from the very successful SharePoint eDiscovery webinar with Reed Smith.  It is a topic that came up time and again in my tenure as an analyst; companies and government Agencies are becoming tightly bound to SharePoint and want to be sure that eDiscovery ordeals can be avoided.

Microsoft SharePoint continues to gain widespread traction in organizations large and small.  A recent Forrester Research survey found that 66% of respondents will deploy SharePoint server in the next 12 months (source: Forrester Research August 2013 Global SharePoint Usage online survey).  The attraction to SharePoint is obvious – the system creates business benefits: enabling collaboration in efficient ways; providing ways to track versions of documents edited by multiple parties; allowing non-technical business people to apply basic workflow to content-driven processes, and providing faster access to information (via search and integration with the MS Office suite of apps).

For the value it creates, SharePoint can cause eDiscovery and information governance headaches if proper planning does not take place.  It is all too easy to assume that if information is searchable, eDiscovery will be no problem when the time comes.  But, as is often the case in life, the devil is in the details.  Because SharePoint allows users to add value to content (e.g. adding workflow tasks), there is the factor of metadata to consider.

In eDiscovery, metadata is a critical component of ESI that can wreak havoc on collection efforts.  When we talk about metadata for native ESI, we are usually concerned about the Operating System (OS) fields that are kept in the File Allocation Table (FAT). Different OS formats support a wide variety of fields such as different dates, attributes, permissions and file name formats (long vs. short). These fields are not usually stored within the actual file and so are very vulnerable to alteration or complete loss when items are read or copied. Forensic collection is focused on preserving this ‘envelope’ information so that evidence can be authenticated and the context reconstructed in court. That is only half of the metadata story. Microsoft Office and other programs retain non-displayed information within the header and body of all common file types, especially with the adoption of the XML based Office 2007 file formats.

This metadata issue is only extended with SharePoint because most collection efforts are focused only on grabbing SharePoint document libraries (as they are stored on file systems).  But SharePoint is so much more than document libraries (if it weren’t, it would simply be another file share sitting out there).

A defensible SharePoint collection solution will be able to capture document libraries, metadata, and truly enable contextual preservation.  When considering a SharePoint collection tool be sure that it:

  • Allows for incremental preservation, monitoring changes, identifying and preserving different document versions, and incrementally preserve to multiple matters over time
  • Maps to custodian access and prevent over-preservation, collecting and preserving only what is relevant to a particular custodian, not the entire SharePoint site
  • Is deployable in the same fashion as SharePoint, which tends to be highly decentralized and siloed; thus the collection solution should be deployable on-demand, directly to SharePoint sites through a highly automated, remote installation, with intuitive administration and operation performed through a standard web browser

At the end of the day, informed customers will make sure that the collection tool can get more than just SharePoint document libraries, but all metadata, as well.  Also, look for solutions that will not impact the production environment too heavily; you don’t want to bring SharePoint to its knees when it is a valuable business application.  And finally, get legal and IT together on the same page about how to reasonably prove that your SharePoint preservation and collection methodologies and tools are defensible.

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August 29, 2013 · 2:06 PM

Microsoft’s Lessons for the eDiscovery Industry

Microsoft imageThe announcement that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is set to retire within 12 months naturally spurred some thought on the analogous plateauing or even demise of prominent eDiscovery software firms in recent years. In my view, there are two general lessons to be gleaned by the eDiscovery industry from Microsoft’s troubles.

The first is about the speed of change in this industry. Three years ago, the PC was king and predictive coding was a fairly obscure term. Now, mobile devices, cloud, social media and desktop virtualization have relegated the traditional PC to the road to legacy status. And we all know the story of the tidal wave that is the predictive coding craze of 2013.

And this leads to the second and related lesson, which is the difficulty for dominant companies to stay innovative in such a fast-changing environment. This past week featured a lot of commentary from business and technology pundits, mostly making fairly obvious points about Microsoft missing the boat on smart phones, tablets and the Vista and Windows 8 debacles. But in terms of the bigger picture, I like the analysis from Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who summoned wisdom from 14th Century North African philosopher Ibn Khaldun:

“One insight (Khaldun) had, based on the history of his native North Africa, was that there was a rhythm to the rise and fall of dynasties. Desert tribesmen, he argued, always have more courage and social cohesion than settled, civilized folk, so every once in a while they will sweep in and conquer lands whose rulers have become corrupt and complacent. They create a new dynasty — and, over time, become corrupt and complacent themselves, ready to be overrun by a new set of barbarians.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to apply this story to Microsoft, a company that did so well with its operating-system monopoly that it lost focus, while Apple — still wandering in the wilderness after all those years — was alert to new opportunities. And so the barbarians swept in from the desert.”

And I think it’s even less of stretch to apply this story to the eDiscovery software industry. For instance, in speaking to a couple of eDiscovery executives last week, they lamented that a dominant review tool his company relies on, had in their opinion become “long in the tooth” with the executives of that software provider no longer very accessible. Another leading eDiscovery software vendor recently launched a major upgrade to their flagship product resulting in palpable user exodus as the new version was much more complex, with a brand new interface that fell flat. Basically straight out of the Windows 8 playbook.  Not be outdone in its loss of focus, a similar and also market leading company now supports, by my count, at least 12 different products and at least 5 different markets.

And I think this trend of disruption is accentuated in the eDiscovery field because even the dominant players do not have several million in idle funds for research and development into cutting-edge technologies that will not produce meaningful revenue in the near term. Instead, they have to answer to investors of various stripes who demand that quarterly revenue numbers and positive near term cash flow are met. It’s the classic innovators dilemma.

What this means for key buyers of eDiscovery software is that they should be open to change and consider avoiding lock-in with seemingly dominate vendors who could only be months away from being displaced by the barbarians from the desert.

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