Loading ...While pontificating on industry trends at ILTA, I joked that Fedex was the ultimate beneficiary of corporations that take their eDiscovery to the Cloud. Scant weeks later, my good friend Pete Pepiton at Mimecast responded to my ad hoc remark with the headline, “Fedex’s Profit Doubles”. We have had various Secure File Transfer Protocols for years, yet the practical bandwidth limitations of most internet transmissions have taught us not to try sending more than 5 GB of files via the web. In plain language terms, the web was just not designed for the kind of large file burst capacity transfers that typify an eDiscovery collection. There is a good discussion of these limits by Stacey Higginbotham here.
So what is your real internet upload bandwidth? According to Stacey, the most common corporate connect is a T-1 line with 1.5 Mbps. So if you hog your entire company’s bandwidth, you will manage 15 GB per day. I have collected single custodians who had 50+ GB of just PST files, much less their forensic images. Even if your company has paid $300-500k for a blazing fast OC-48 line so that you can send at 1 TB per hour, you may still be limited by a backbone connection and will almost certainly be back to a crawl at the delivery connetion. Nextpoint is the only eDiscovery cloud provider that I have heard of so far using the global Amazon Web Services (AWS) backbone.
Even Amazon recognized the bandwidth issue last year and implemented a new AWS Import/Export service for shipping your data on a hard drive via the postal system. So even one of the largest, global cloud providers has acknowledged that the Cloud is designed for digital rain and that there is still a price to lift data back into the cloud. AWS’s guidelines for when you ship your data tell the story.
When Amazon thinks that you should ship
As an example the bandwidth challenge that most firms, solo practitioners and smaller eDiscovery providers face, I am currently transferring 2.5 GB of compressed Enron PSTs to a client site for a testing engagement. My home office supposedly has AT&T’s highest bandwidth option in my area, yet I still average only 175 kbs on long term uploads. It looks like that 2.5 GBs will be uploading for the next 32 hours according to this handy bandwidth calculator.
Upload Time for 2.5 GB of Enron PSTs
The raw speed of transfer and potential shipping costs/risks should be factored into your decisions to move your eDiscovery to the cloud. I am not saying that it is not practical or even more cost effective (especially at $25/GB/month). I am saying that you need to know about the upload/download issues and carefully evaluate whether you can tolerate them in your typical eDiscovery scenarios. I do not see the Cloud as being any different from most national hosting providers in this, except for the price of course.
Greg,
You’ve hit on yet another interesting topic. Bandwidth and data transfer rates can certainly be an obstacle in various scenarios, some of which you mention. However, I think you’re only telling half of the story when you say, “FedEx wins the eDiscovery Cloud Wars.” Back in March, 2010 CaseCentral released its ‘Blueprint for Cloud-based eDiscovery,’ and in it we pointed out a fact that we’ve learned in over 17 years in the business: FedEx wins in the on-premise world or in the cloud-based / SaaS world.
Today’s typical process involves issuing a legal hold and collecting relevant data in electronic, paper or other format. At this point the vast majority of corporations put this collected data on a CD, DVD, hard drive or USB drive and ship it (via FedEx) to a vendor, outside counsel or the outside counsel’s vendor. And, if the matter is multi-jurisdictional or involves multiple outside counsel, the data is copied many times and shipped to the many recipients who have varying levels of technological sophistication, security and compliance controls. At this point the corporation’s proprietary and confidential data has been copied potentially many times and has left the confines of the corporation to be loaded into some other software program(s) at the end destination.
So, FedEx wins either way and we all should have bought stock in FedEx when we saw this coming. Having said that, it goes without saying that cloud-based eDiscovery companies, like CaseCentral, receive, process and ingest data that we receive over the wire or via FedEx every day. The more important question you have to ask yourself is: in the example above, do I want to worry about all the copies of my corporate data floating around that I don’t have control over or am I better off using cloud computing-based eDiscovery software that stores only a single copy of a document despite the fact that it may be used in multiple cases with different workflows and designations in each. With such software, the data can be centrally managed, controlled and secured regardless of the number of firms or users who need access. And the corporation can audit security once, thereby ensuring compliance with privacy requirements, as opposed to having to audit any number of outside counsel and vendors who receive the data.
Cheers,
-Steve d’Alencon
September 25, 2010 at 12:06 pm
sdalencon
Member Type: Corporate | Role: Other | Size: Med (<1000) | Years of Experience: 20
Steve,
Good perspective, but I would say that there are many ways to manage corporate ESI and minimize exposure during litigation. Adopting an outsourced, single-provider model is just one alternative. Many corporations with heavy litigation profiles are in-sourcing technology for the same benefits, with very different risks. Others are consolidating their outside counsel under alternative fee arrangements. So you definitely hit the mark on the risks of the traditional ad-hoc response model, but using a single cloud based provider is only one option.
Greg
September 27, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Greg Buckles
Member Type: Other | Role: Consultant | Size: Solo | Years of Experience: 22 | Certifications/Licenses: court certified expert witness