Guest Column: Thinking Next Generation eDiscovery

By Steve Akers, founder and CTO of Digital Reef

Content Management Systems. SharePoint. Email databases. File servers. Storage Appliances. Social Networks. The Cloud. We've heard of all these technologies but what do they all have in common? They are filled with data, with content and with business information critical to any eDiscovery assessment or case. However, most organizations do not have one common way to discover, analyze and act on this information.

While it may seem relatively innocuous, this lack of insight into information asset actually results in a very significant business risk and cost — the inability to efficiently make information actionable for line-of-business applications — that manifests itself in many ways. For example, it leads to:

• Time-consuming, costly eDiscovery
• Manual, risk-laden compliance processes
• Inconsistent records management practices
• No way to know what information is valuable versus not
• Information redundancy – multiple copies across multiple locations.