A Map from Reactive to Proactive Data Discovery
Author: Thomas Wuerz - Veritas
… We believe it is time to discuss a proactive data discovery approach with your legal IT team, supporting targeted eDiscovery processes and modern tools. Like the idea of having a 'clean' and 'organized' garage, right? A garage in which you can find stuff and throw away unnecessary items from time to time…
… The key to rolling back your 'data fog of war' is a proactive data map that visualizes data sources, data types, business units, and custodial data ownership. For too long corporate legal has relied on custodians and IT administrators to scope holds and collections without having visibility into the context and content of targeted sources…
Way back in 2006 I was part of the Symantec team evaluating the Orchestria classification engine for a potential acquisition (CA later bought them). While the security folks were all focused on DLP, I wanted to use Symantec’s anti-virus root kit to classify unstructured files on local and network shares. They were my nemesis in my prior corporate litsupport director role. As Autonomy found out, index lag and connectivity issues on enterprise search introduced too large an error for discovery search unless it lived in a content management or archive system (Enterprise Vault). I figured we could just create smart rules to classify docs on creation at the source. It did not work. Not well enough to justify the acquisition. Fourteen years later Veritas seems to have made my pipe dream work for the big unstructured network data sources. Their Classification engine even comes with 700+ pre-built classifiers. Nice job. Now I understand why my old mentor Nick Mehta used to tease me about the worst thing you can be as an entrepreneur is ahead of the market.