Why Not Move Your eDiscovery to the Cloud? – Part 2

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2011-12-12 09:10:03  Continued from Why Not Move Your eDiscovery to the Cloud? – Part 1…The second concern regards how to move the actual data to and from the Cloud storage. Many providers will tell you that you can just upload your data directly via web or ftp. STOP HERE. Normal File Transfer Protocol or web page upload is NOT protected. So use an SFTP equivalent or better yet look at the previous paragraph and only send encrypted packages. Internet backbone speeds still limit the practical size of uploads to 5-10 GB unless you have a dedicated pipe to your provider. Data uploads that take longer than 1-2 hours may crash or bog down your own network. eDiscovery performance is all about getting that large collection on line for review as fast as possible. But just as the speed and performance wars died from lack of interest, I think that most legal users have come to understand that it may take a day or two to properly handle and process potential evidence. While service providers and certain global corporations may have a high proportion of large (>10 GB) collections or productions, a quick check with a couple clients revealed that only 10-15% of their collections might need to be loaded directly by the host. I wrote a piece last year about how Fedex may be the true winner in the migration to the cloud.

Further research into the AWS Import/Export service (shipping hard drives to/from the Cloud) leads me to believe that you could build a practical, defensible process for transferring your larger collections. I used the handy AWS Import/Export Calculator to determine that a 1 TB collection of 1 GB PST files on a single drive would cost $116.38 to load and return the drive. For a mythical company with 100 new matters per year, you could guesstimate roughly 25 large loads and probably the same number of large productions for a yearly cost of ~$5,500. My main point here is that the costs of moving your eDiscovery software and storage to the Cloud can be quantified and budgeted. I still think that it is very early in the adoption curve for such a conservative customer base to make the leap to the Cloud. One of my favorite law firm clients remarked that Word Perfect 5.0 was one of the longest running applications he knew of. Some attornies and paralegals just will not let go of a program that they know well. I guess that as long it gets the job done, it is not worth the fight to upgrade or replace legacy legal software. The newest generation of associates and legal staff can lead the way with true web-based applications that are hardware agnostic and iPad compatible.