New Tools for the Old School: Affordable Early Case Assessment and Information Governance

The benefits of information governance extend beyond boards and courts—legal, IT and audit users can increase the probability of a positive outcome in due diligence proceedings, audits, compliance assessments and all manner of internal investigation. The key value of these emerging technologies is that, as a unified solution, they can perform accurate searches quickly, reliably and affordably. This enables even SMBs and SMEs to approach their information governance with the same diligence and confidence that a Fortune 500 organization might.

Positive process outcomes also result from automation of information governance and policy management. Employing best practices eliminates data ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial), reduces storage costs, improves server performance, speeds backups and ensures enforcement of retention and data management policies.

One View of the Truth

So now you get it. Unpredictable e-discovery costs are undermining the credibility of corporate counsel. The overhead of administering inadequate or silo systems are placing a burden on critical IT resources. The exorbitant cost of so-called e-discovery platforms can't be borne by most organizations, and company leaders are placing greater emphasis on expense predictability. The time it takes to search, sort and submit documents (particularly unstructured data) equals cost, so reducing that time simply saves money.

Cloud-based solutions possess some inherent advantages and present some obvious benefits; predictable cost chiefly among them. Cloud computing also offers the advantage of dynamic scalability, employing nearly limitless processing power when you need it, and scaling back when you don't. Building a system that provides powerful compute on demand and limitless storage, as the cloud does, isn't within the grasp of 99% of the world's corporations, but is critical for performing discovery on very large datasets. With the cloud as the underlying infrastructure, some SaaS (software as a service) vendors are now offering tools worthy of your consideration if you're looking to delve deeper, derive meaning and decide faster.

E-discovery is E-xpensive!

Separate systems, service bureaus, outside counsel and auditors, LPOs, legacy e-discovery or archiving software...

Estimates of the total cost of e-discovery (identification, collection, preservation, processing, review & analysis) hover around $18,000 per gigabyte. The average business mailbox size is between three and five gigabytes, so it certainly doesn't take long for even a small organization to rack up significant costs. Cloud-based SaaS makes this cost predictable. While that alone won't guarantee success, it will make your CFO happier!