Historical Essays

Cloud computing is a hot topic. The cloud’s ability to provide solutions that are lower cost and simpler to manage just cannot be ignored. Our recent SaaS survey showed that approximately 75% of respondents are leaning toward SaaS or hybrid on-premise/SaaS solutions for eDiscovery. Craig Ball recently put out a very interesting article about how running eDiscovery technology in the cloud will be more efficient. Craig goes so far as to say, “cloud computing makes collection unnecessary.”

I thoroughly enjoyed today’s webinar on using legal holds to start expiring ever-growing archives. I wanted to thank my panelists: Kyle McClain (Monsanto), Allison Walton Esq (Symantec) and Mikki Tomlinson. Mikki was Chesapeake Energy’s eDiscovery Advisor when we asked her to participate in the webinar, but the eDJ Group was fortunate enough to steal her away to become our new Director of Consulting. We have been growing out our strategic services group based on my Reason-eD client base to meet the demand for independent eDiscovery expertise. Now back to the webinar. This webinar and the eDJ research report, “Legal Holds for Enterprise Archives” were inspired by the sudden upsurge in interest we have seen in corporations wanting to finally start shrinking the archives that they implemented to manage email and legal preservation requirements. Thanks to Symantec for sponsoring complimentary copies of the research report for all attendees.

It would be naïve to think that eDiscovery could knock the train that is “the cloud” off its rails. However, the stringent rules that companies are under to produce information in a timely manner for litigation or compliance purposes could be a thorn in the side for both companies and cloud providers a alike. eDJ is currently running a survey on eDiscovery and the cloud (take it and you could win a Kindle Fire). Analysis of the data is ongoing and the findings are both interesting and a bit scary for anyone responsible for information management.

This is my first entry as a contributor to the eDiscoveryJournal so I wanted to make it special with an announcement about a new initiative I’m leading with the eDJ Group. While you and I may not have met yet and we may not have met the other professionals that are reading this blog at the very same time, we are all bonded by this special community of eDiscovery and information governance professionals. Wouldn’t you agree that we could all grow from each other’s knowledge? Of course we could!The ability to share knowledge, pain points, successes and challenges, and state of the market with peers is invaluable. The challenges, however, include: opportunity, confidentiality, competition and facilitation. In recognizing both the need for knowledge sharing in our industry and the challenges associated therewith, eDiscovery Journal and eDJ Group have created the “eDJ Peer Group” and I am proud to lead its launch.

Happy Thanksgiving!! As we approach the eve of Thanksgiving, I wanted to take a moment to give a heartfelt "Thank You" to all of the loyal blog readers and clients. With your continued support, we continue to grow and implement our unique business model. There is so much to be thankful for these days here at the eDiscoveryJournal and eDJ Group. Over the past few months we have been carefully planning our next steps. I wanted to give everyone an update on our direction and how we’ve moved beyond a niche blog site.A few weeks ago we announced the creation of the eDJ Group, Inc. Now headquartered in Austin, Tx, the eDJ Group is now the main business entity for our organization which all of our products and services roll-up. The eDJ Group is made up of several practice areas: 1) Strategic Consulting, 2) Analyst Services, 3) the eDiscoveryJournal, and 4) eDJ Matrix.

The cost of storage has come up in several recent engagements for firms and corporations. I started thinking about while we were brainstorming in preparation for our recent webinar on enabling expiry on archives. Calculating a Return on Investment (ROI) on a legal hold initiative includes the recovered cost of storage when you can eliminate 40-80% of your non-records. It was pointed out that storage costs have dropped so much that eDiscovery costs have superseded them as the primary motivation for cleaning house. My panelists trotted out several figures ($/GB) from well known analysts for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of storage. I feel that Amazon S3, Rackspace and other global cloud services have clearly set the market price on storage at less than 15¢/GB. Yep, that’s right 15¢/GB. I can recall early eDiscovery hosting RFP’s at $30-50/GB/Month for online storage. That was just for storage, but it made an easy argument for in-house systems when many matters can run for 2-3 years or longer. Hosting providers generally lead with their processing and review offerings and tend to bury the ongoing storage costs deep in their bids, even though these recurring costs can represent the highest margin item on the engagement.