Loading ...When eDiscovery first hit the scene, many of us in the analyst community predicted that enterprise content management (ECM) vendors would ultimately be the big solution providers that win out. It seemed like records management would be the right way to proactively manage information for eDiscovery. But, a funny thing happened on the way to forum – ECM hasn’t yet won out. In fact, no one category of solution has yet to emerge as the big eDiscovery winner. But, a recent Greg Buckles comment on my article about eDiscovery technologies being applied to other use-cases really got me thinking about how our market is evolving.
Greg’s comment read, “The decision to just rely on the [backup] tapes seems like it is just putting off the inevitable and raising the final price. Organizations keep hoping that ‘inaccessible’ designations will hold up in court, but I don’t see that happening without a serious investment in an archive or other live repository that allows you to say that there is nothing unique on the tapes.” He’s referring to the fact that some companies are looking to information off backup tapes and into searchable repositories in an effort to get rid of the tapes. Traditionally, eDiscovery has relied on collecting information from a variety of sources (hence why it’s been such a nightmare). Solutions like Digital Reef, Kazeon, Recommind, and StoredIQ arose to give organizations a more centralized interface for collection. In addition, many organizations turned to archiving in order to centralize the management of tricky content types like email and file system content.
Where I see a lot of interest now is in archiving all the high-volume, user-generated content, even that from ECM systems (SharePoint is a good example). While ECM systems are closely connected to content-centric processes (think insurance claims management), the information deemed necessary could be archived (alongside email and other content) – and the archive could become the eDiscovery system of record. A lot of the legal types I run this past like it – because it seems both reasonable and like a good faith effort.
The ECM vendors all have archive offerings. Match those up with good search capabilities and perhaps some review and ECA acquisitions down the road and perhaps the archive will become the path via which EMC vendors stake the claim to the eDiscovery market. It’s just a thought for now, but I’m interested in knowing what you think…
Barry,
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. We produce file and archive software and are consistently hearing that the archive should become the eDiscovery system of record because it is both reasonable and includes the majority of the potentially relevant documents. Realistically, most firms did not get to this point directly. As your post includes, many took the path through ECM, believing ECM would be the way to go, but invariably reality brought them to the archive.
We think the biggest reason that the archive is able to handle eDiscovery is its ability to scale up to meet the incredible influx of data in today’s enterprises. ECM makes a great case as a system of record since it is capable of maintaining rich amounts of metadata with strong workflow and classification tools that specialists can get their hands on. But the massive volume of documents and records, the types of data that ECM solutions were not designed to work with, has made ECM repositories a poor choice for eDiscovery work. Just think about how many emails you generate a day vs. the number of documents you generate a day. Large firms can easily receive and produce over 1 million emails per day. The largest firms over 10 million per day. Not only were ECM solutions not designed to manage that kind of daily load, some quick grade school math shows that it would take a large enterprise only around a month to fill the largest ECM repositories, and the largest customers would be able to do that in one week.
In addition, the functional advantage that ECM solutions had over email and file archiving solutions has eroded significantly over the past several years. Features such as auto-classification, enterprise wide searches, policy management, lexicons, e-discovery workflow, granular retention and records management have become de rigueur in most archiving solutions. And capabilities like real-time compliance and supervision have surpassed the capabilities of most ECM technologies simply because the demands made by email go beyond that of documents.
As you point out, ECM solutions find themselves being archived by systems that were previously working only on email. Files, Sharepoint documents, IMs, social networking content, even unified messaging data are now being captured by archive systems. Not everyone has realized this yet, not least of which the ECM vendors, but this reality is transforming the way most firms handle eDiscovery and records management.
August 18, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Stephen Chan
Member Type: Corporate | Role: Sales | Size: Solo | Years of Experience: 11